Fermented olives

olive harvest

Last autumn, I helped a friend in Croatia to harvest his olives. I had also selected good big ones of the Buje variety to try to make pickled olive.

Eating fresh olive is difficult, there is first a nice oil aroma, same as the flavor of oil after pressing, then a horribly strong bitterness fill the mouth, this is the taste from the water phase. Indeed making olive oil requires a two steps process, first to press the juice out, then to centrifuge to remove the aqueous phase. 

Fermented olives

The same has to be done to olives to remove that bitterness during pickling. The fast way, as used in most of the commercially available pickled olives, is to use salt to draw out the bitter liquid, change water and re-salt repeatedly for at least 2 weeks. The end result is very salty olives, or tasteless ones because of being soaked in water repeatedly to remove saltiness!

I searched for a while on the internet to eventually found this natural method. Basically a lazy method, all needed to do is to wait for fermentation to happen, using microbes to digest the bitterness.

It took 6 months to remove all bitterness. 

Fermented olives

Unlike shop bought ones, these fermented olives are not salty, still crunchy, and most amazingly the some oil is retained inside, there is a nice aroma of the oil. 

Olives

5% salt water (boiled and cooled down)

1/2 cup cider vinegar