What’d You Do Last Weekend?

I'm sure you still have mint in your garden, so why not try to make your own mint chocolate chip ice cream? Cacao nibs stand-in for chocolate chips in this grown-up version.

Epic Failure: Curing and Brining Olives

Posted by jenny on 12/23/2009

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As with many things I write about, I have no idea what possessed me to believe that I should cure olives. Isn't our tiny house and our tiny kitchen already stuffed with my experiments (in progress now: plum wine, hard cider, salted liver)?

Olives weren't even premeditated. I saw them in the produce section looking kind of sickly. The conversation with myself went something like this:

Oh look! Olives! I've never done olives before. I wonder how hard they are. I mean, how hard can they be? Someone's been making them for hundreds of years without technology, surely I can figure it out. And if they don't go well...well, I better just buy a pound.

I got the pound home, looked them over, and went online. I was a little intimidated by the lye-curing technique - only because I was unsure about how safe ingesting lye would be, even the 'it's safe to eat' variety. I'd seen on a few posts the steps for water curing and I decided I'd try that. Figured if it was going to fail, at least I wouldn't be changing lye-water daily. Water curing involves rinsing the olives daily (or more often) until the bitterness is done, something I'd do and not lose sleep if the results went south.

About a week or two later, I saw olive curing/brining posts from both Michael Ruhlman and Hank Shaw, and I was relieved to think I wouldn't be finishing the process alone. With their guidance, I knew I'd make it.

The olives water cured for about 4 weeks. That was how long it took to pull out the bitterness. After that, I brined them in a salty/vinegary solution with some bay leaves and orange and lemon zest. They sat in that solution for about a month. Things were looking good. I pulled them out for a taste test and...GAG! The bitterness was all back again. I thought I had gotten all of it out but it was definitely still there - so I tossed the vinegar solution and in desperation put the olives back in a water cure to try to leech out the bitter again.

I had a second set of olives going at the same time, and those were a few weeks behind the first. After they were all abandoned over a holiday weekend, I came home to find them deep in the throes of a stinky mold, the water completely cloudy and the flesh falling from the pits. That was it, enough. I tossed them in the yard waste bin and vowed to try the lye approach next time. If there's a next time.