Homecured Olives

This year I tried curing my own olives. It was something that has crossed my mind in the past but it never went beyond the curiosity stage. I guess I was having problems finding raw green olives in small quantities (didn't want five gallons of the stuff.) But last x-mas my friend gave me a jar of her home cured olives which tasted sooooo good I was hooked. Turned out that the town at the bottom of our hill has streets lined with olive trees and after a call to the supervisor of Streets and Parks and got the ok to pick them, I was in.

Having picked the olives late in the season, many of the had already changed color and had begun to ripen. In the end I had olives in three different stages of ripeness so I experimented with different processes (future post). The green olives I used the lye method. I was a little scared for I read lye is poison and commonly used as drain opener. But after reading many, many blogs, I was assured it was safe.

About a day in the lye solution, followed by five days of water, and then two days in a brine, my olives were done. Aren't they gorgeous?

Even straight out of the brine solution the olives were very tasty but I decided to give them some extra seasoning. For all of them I added garlic and peppercorns as a base. I tried some different flavorings: one was with rosemary and italian seasoning, the other was bay leaves, and the third was hickory smoke flavor added by liquid smoke. They were all good in their own way. Once we start eating them it's hard to stop. Maybe that five gallons wouldn't of been too much after all. ^_^