06. Making them Delicious

This is the next-to-final step. After this you get to enjoy your own olives, made to your taste and more juicy and delicious than any store-bought product.

The basic marinade will be just some olive oil and some red wine, or red wine vinegar. Dilute with water and you are ready to transfer your pickled olives from the salt-water solution into the marinade for finishing. Let them sit there for about three days, then refrigerate them to keep them fresh. They will last for up to six months refrigerated.

Again, eye-ball it with the oil and wine. You'll be the one eating them olives. Taste your olives after three days #marinading. Does it need more wine? Add more wine.

Too much salt? Add water to pull it out.

Above are olives in traditional red-wine vinegar and olive-oil brine, with some water added.

You can add any spices you like, but the #traditional spices that go well with #olives are black cumin, cumin seeds, pepper corns, dill seeds, and oregano.

Remember how to pickle your olives? And crucially, how to pick them olives?

If so, you're now a full-fledged olive master, cadet! I congratulate You on your achievement, and wish you the best of luck and the juiciest, most savoury experience pickling your own olives!

If you get in a pickle with any of this stuff head over to the YouTube channel (be warned: work in progress) for some additional tips and other accompanying material.

Signed, Sevilo – the olive lover.

UPDATE: Discussion is on HN.

This series is the first draft of a book. It is made possible to be freely available by the virtue of the sales of said book, where the electronic version and a print version are available for purchase on Amazon. Please consider buying the book—this helps me continue publishing useful manuals like this one online.

Thank you!

UPDATE: And take a look at the paperback edition, printed in full color!

UPDATE: New book! Manual Flatbread

03. A Crucial Stage

Wash your farmer's market or hand-picked olives in your sink. Take out the stems and leaves, check carefully for disfigured or blemished olives. We don't want those.

One bad olive can ruin the whole batch, so watch out.

The #Pickle (or The Cure, if you're a fan)

04. Get some Sea-Salt

Traditionally, this part of the process involves the actual water from the Mediterranean Sea. But since you might not have access to that said sea, just get some sea salt, or coarse grain kosher salt. In the worst case your regular kitchen fine-grained salt will do, but I do not recommend it. I don't.

This is when the sour goes out and the savoury goes in.

You see, fresh #olives are somewhere between too sour to breathe and too... bitter like hell. They are not nice. Try one.

Better yet, try and make your friend try one. Their face will tell you all you need to know about how the tongue dries out immediately and all your gauges go “Mommy!”

To get this taste out and to make olives palatable Mediterranean peoples have historically pickled them. It's not the sauerkraut process, as it does not involve the corresponding bacterium; and it's not the vinegar pickling process, as it involves no vinegar.

This is just water, getting the sour out. And some salt keeping the olives lively and fresh.

“Hold on, wait a second!”, you might be thinking. “Salt in cold water alone is not enough to keep something submerged from going bad and disintegrating!”

And you'd be right. This is where You come in.

After you've picked and washed your olives you are to submerge them in a salt-water solution. The rule is one tea-spoon of salt for every cup of water that you add. You don't need be precise, so just eye-ball it. For a jar of 1L (2 pints) this would be about two cups of water, so about two teaspoons of salt. Done.

You'll have to check on your olives every two to three days. Funky smell? Change out the water/salt solution. White scum floating on top? Get it to the sink and blow on the scum to get it out. Top off with water.

Olives floating to the top? Get rid of them, those are not good. They will spoil your batch, or just come out dry.

Don't over-fill your jar with olives, leave an inch or so of water on top. Or alternatively use a rigid mesh to push the olives down below the water surface, to create an anaerobic environment for them. That means no air touching your olives!

Your olives will sit on the bench (meaning not refrigerated) for four to six weeks. After about four weeks try one, to see if they are ready for marinading.

In that time you'll change out the salt-water two to three times—this is to get rid of the bitter and the sour. Trust your tastebuds. You'll be the one eating them olives after all!

The Other Side of Pickling

05. Salt Only

There is an alternate route to the salt-water solution, and it is shorter. But also more involved.

It goes like this: you don't add water, but you do use a bunch of kosher salt. The salt will pull the water out of your olives, which you'll see happening on day three. The salt will also pull out the bitter, sour taste and #cure your olives. Change the salt out every week, and in three to four weeks your olives will be ready.

But you'll have to come and shake them up every day, twice a day. One time in the morning, one time in the afternoon. Get the salt moving around.

Do you remember how to pick your olives? Do read on to the next step, the marinading!

This series is the first draft of a #paleo diet compatible cook-book. And think that it is made possible to be freely available by the virtue of the sales of said book, where the electronic version and print version is available for purchase on Amazon. Please consider buying the book—this helps me continue publishing useful manuals like this one online.

Thank you!

How Not To Muck Them Up

01. Ouverture

The Where, What and How of Olives

Do You like pickles? Pickled olives? Marinaded in olive oil, with spices; or plain ol' olives as a side-dish; do You? Good news.

I love olives. My work lunch is olives and whatever. Literally whatever. Day in, day out it goes. Olives are delicious.

#Olives are the Sriracha of pickles, put them next to anything and they make it palatable at least, if not outright great.

This is not the Bible of Olives, this is more like the Hitchhiker's Guide to Olive-making. Having read this series you'll be more than adequately equipped to pickle any kind of olive or olive-like substance you might encounter on Earth and beyond.

Would you like to be able to pick, pickle and marinade your own olives? Then this is the book for You.

Store-bought olives are made with expedience and cost in mind. They are frequently too salty (salt speeds up the pickling process), under-seasoned (to save up on spices), and generally “meaty”. Tasteless, is one man's opinion.

You can do so much better. Just read on.

02. Getting Good Olives

Do Be Picky-Choosy

You can get your fresh olives at the local farmer's market, or grow an olive tree in your garden; or even encounter them in the wild if you're in the Mediterranean area.

The olives you want are ripe, close to ripe, large, with no blemishes or visible rot. Stems are to be discarded.

So how do you pick your olives?

This depends on whether you're buying them or #picking them from the tree. Buying fresh olives is easy.

Picking from the tree offers multiple choices. If it is a tree in your garden – get an old bed sheet, or a painter's plastic sheet and shake the tree branches. You'll get plenty.

If you happen upon a wild olive tree you can reach out and grab a branch, and then just gently scrape the olive fruits into a bowl or a bag. Be careful not to squash them if they are ripe and squishy.

If, on the other hand—you are shopping the local farmer's market then the olives on offer are probably what you want. The guys take pride in their produce, give them a shot. You can always come back for more, or a different farmer's to get the specific flavour you're after.

Discard the small ones, disfigured ones, the ones that have spots or blemishes. There is no better time to be picky. One rotten olive can muck up the whole batch for you, so get the large ones, get the better-looking ones, get the kind you'd like to see on your plate. This is a bad time to be frugal, and you've been warned.

Next step is to wash them and get rid of all the stems and leaves.

This series is made possible because of the sales of this book on Amazon. Please consider supporting free manuals like this online!

UPDATE: New book! Manual Flatbread The new book is about Mediterranean cuisine, and is not strictly #paleo.