#15 - Cure Some Olives

Last weekend while at the Wilkins' in Los Olivos, I decided to get a start on item #15, "Cure Some Olives, No Matter What Ails Them."

Doug and Sue have some giant-ass olive trees in their yard.  They are beautiful, but apparently the bane of Doug's landscape maintenance existence.  They dump their fruit indiscriminately about the yard creating a big purple mess wherever they splat.

I decided to help them out by taking a few pounds off their hands.  I would post pictures of the harvesting, but I didn't have our camera and Sue's pictures are posted on Kodak's photo sharing site where I wasn't allowed to download.  You can actually see the slide show by clicking on the link, but I am in several of the pictures, so how good can they be.  Anyway, the show features Doug standing on one of his drywalling ladders, stripping olives from the trees and me crawling around gathering them all up.

When we got home on Sunday I busied myself washing and sorting olives and dispatched Denise to Home Depot (primarily for railroad ties for my retaining walls) with instructions to pick up some lye.  I figured they would surely have it and if not, I assumed she could get it at Albertson's.  WRONG!  Lye is apparently very difficult to come by.  Turns out after a little online research that lye is apparently used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, so many places have stopped carrying it.

So, I gave up, temporarily, on the lye-cured olives I had planned and instead started two batches, one water cured (destined for Kalamata-ness) and the other salt cured.

As with most things, I have no frickin' clue what I am doing, but am forging ahead anyway, in this case with the assistance of a paper on olive curing from UC Davis.

The water-cured olives apparently have the advantage of being ready for consumption in a relatively short time, 5 to 6 weeks.  I started a batch last week (the jar with the reddish-looking ones) and today transferred them from their final water soak and into the briny concoction where they are supposed to remain for about a month.  These are tiny little olives, so I'm guessing they will be well brined in more like a fortnight.  (Is a fortnight anything like a dog year? New York minute?  One night in a fort feels like fourteen days?)  I also started a second jar of water-cured this morning (the black jar in the photo.)

The salt-cured ones will take a bit longer.  I am not truly optimistic about them, but what the heck.  I contrived a small curing container with a 2-liter plastic bottle.  I punched some holes in the bottom so that liquids could escape and lined the bottom with cheesecloth so the salt could not.  It seems like it might be working, although I am using Kosher and not pickling salt as prescribed by UCD.  They are supposed to get a weekly toss to redistribute everything, their first being this morning.  So, I can confuse people by telling them that I tossed my olives this morning.  Should that be cookies?  The olives seem to be coming along.  I hope they turn out to be worth their salt.

Not having given up entirely on lye-curing, I ordered some lye on line.  Sadly, it's kind of a dangerous chemical, so next-day air is not an option.  It is shipping UPS ground and god only knows when it will get here.  I'm afraid my olive harvest will be well past the point where it should have been curing by the time the lye arrives, but oh well, I guess it will wait until next year.  Or, I could always use it to make pretzels.  Or soap.  Or crystal meth, I guess.

Actually, since I've been ordering lye and researching lye's link to methamphetamine, I should be a little careful about those kinds of comments.  I'd be more worried is we were still under the Bush administration, but I suppose there's still some likelihood that the someone from the DEA or Riverside Sheriff could show up at my door.

One last note, as long as you're here anyway, I thought you might like an update on #25 - Grow Rhubarb.  My seeds are doing OK, despite my best efforts to raise them (my best efforts usually being fatal.)  Knock wood.

Look at how cute they are.  Their stems are evening turning a nice rhubarbic red already.

I hope I don't kill them.