Blackrock Rd Salted Olives

Jeanette picking for salted olives

 Two delights from our olive grove are producing our own oil, and our salted olives. This year we picked for oil on 17 - 18th May. We let the olives ripen for two more weeks so they were dark red and juicy then David, Jeantte and I, helped by cottage guests Libby and Mark, picked over Queens Birthday weekend for our salted olives.

 Olive oil corner in the kitchen

We picked 50kg on one day, then Jeanette, David and I sorted them. We chose the largest plumpest olives. This meant close to 25 percent of what we had picked were discarded. These olives were either flawed or had bruised. With the remainder we layered olives and salt and then left them to drain, turning the buckets every few days.

Now they are ready. I rinse the salt off the olives and leave them to dry. After 48 hours,  I sort them again. I sort the large from the small - about 10% are small. The olives have dried massively in the salt. The others are plump and wrinkled. Any that have been bruised in the processes are discarded too.

Olives ready to go into the jars

I smother these in our fresh olive oil then store them in jars. Each jar has 200gms of olives and includes more or less 100 olives!

These olives are whole food/vegan of course. The whole process is kept below 60 degrees, and only NZ sea salt, our organic olive oil, and our organic olives! How good is that. Theses taste fabulous. Neighbour Mena calls them Moroccan sucking stones...pop them in your mouth, eat the olive, then suck on the stone. Comforting and delicious. Variations include adding preserved lemon or orange rind, warming the olives for 15  seconds in the microwave, and adding fresh chopped thyme, or your favourite fresh herbs.