Recipe for Preserving Olives

As some of the fruit start to get a purple-black tinge to them, it is time to pick your green olives for pickling. The easiest way to pick your Olives is to put a tarpaulin on the ground under the tree and either hand pick them off or use a rake with very widely spaced teeth. In the Mediterranean they hit the Olive trees with a long pole to harvest the fruit, this action also breaks off small branches - thus lightly thinning the tree at the same time.

Gather up fruit and rinse in water.

Place Olives on a clean, hard surface and bruise the fruit with a rolling pin. Pricking them with a fork works well too. Bruising or pricking them helps the salt and water to penetrate the fruit.

Put them in a bucket of water with half a cup of cooking or coarse salt per 10 cups of water.

Place a lid (breadboard) on top of the bucket to help keep the Olives submerged.

Pour the water out each day and replace with fresh salted water.

Continue this for about 12 days for green olives, or 10 days for black olives.

To test the Olives, bite one.
When the bitterness has nearly gone the Olives need one more final salting.
Pour off the last of the salted water and measure it so you will know how much salt brine will be required. Measure out that same quantity of warm water into a pot and dissolve the salt at the ratio of - 1 cup salt to 10 cups water. Boil this and allow to cool.

Place 0lives in jars or bottles and then pour the salty brine over the fruit until covered.
Top the jars or bottles up with a centimetre of Olive Oil. This stops air getting in and seals the lids down.
The Olives will keep for up to 12 months in the cupboard.

Before eating, drain off the salty brine and fill the bottles with cool water.

Refrigerate for 24hours.
If after this time they are still too salty to taste fill the bottles with hot water and refrigerate again for 24 hours.