Three bowls of table olives, giant green Cerignola, small red-brown Leccino and anchovy-stuffed Manzanilla, beside a dish of black tapenade, orange peel and a small glass of vermouth

Olives: The Complete Guide

Published 9 Sep 20266 min read

Filed under Olives & Tapenades Espinaler Fratepietro I Contadini Sicily

Pick an olive from a tree and bite it, and you will understand why olives are cured. Raw olives are ferociously bitter because of a compound called oleuropein. Every table olive you have ever enjoyed has been cured: soaked, salted, fermented or treated with lye until the bitterness leached out and something worth eating remained.

Two decisions shape every table olive: when it was picked, which sets its color, and how it was cured, which sets its texture and flavor.

Green, black and everything between

Olives are picked at every stage of ripeness. Green olives come off the tree firm, before they color. Left on the tree, they turn from green through rose and wine-red to black, and a "red" or "turning" olive is one picked partway through that change. One variety can be sold green or black depending on when it was picked, so color says more about ripeness than about type.

Canned black olives are the exception. The uniform, mild, pitted black olives in American cans are made in the California style: green or turning olives are treated with lye, darkened by oxidation and colored with ferrous gluconate, an iron salt, so they turn evenly black. That black comes from the process, not the tree, which is what sets them apart from a naturally ripened Kalamata.

How olives are cured

Brine curing is the traditional slow method. Olives sit in salt water for months while yeasts and lactic acid bacteria ferment them and the bitterness breaks down.

Lye curing is the fast method. A dilute alkaline solution breaks down the oleuropein in hours, after which the olives are rinsed of the lye and moved into brine. Spanish-style green olives, the stuffed Manzanillas of Seville among them, are made this way.

Dry salt curing packs ripe olives in salt until they shrivel and concentrate, giving a wrinkled, salty olive.

The three cures run on different clocks. Lye works in hours, dry salt in weeks and a natural brine fermentation in months. The protected Cerignola olive combines the fast and slow methods: its rules call for green olives to sit in lye for 8 to 15 hours, then ferment in brine for 30 to 60 days.

The varieties worth knowing

Bella di Cerignola. The giant green olive of Puglia, with firm, juicy flesh. Under its protected designation, La Bella della Daunia, a finished olive weighs between 6 and 30 grams and is elongated, shaped like a plum. Fratepietro (shop Fratepietro Cerignola olives) is a Cerignola family firm working the local variety.

Castelvetrano. Sicily's green Nocellara del Belice, prepared in the Castelvetrano style, a method typical of western Sicily.

Leccino. A variety widespread in Tuscany and other Italian regions, medium-sized and elongated, grown mainly for oil. I Contadini, the Puglian producer behind a jarred puntarelle (the puntarelle guide), packs its Leccine as red olives in brine (shop I Contadini Leccine).

Manzanilla. The green Sevillian olive of the Spanish aperitivo hour, lye-cured and brined. Anchovy is a classic stuffing. Espinaler is a Catalan house from Vilassar de Mar, up the coast from Barcelona, whose tavern there dates to 1896 and still pours its own vermouth. Its anchovy-stuffed olives (shop Espinaler anchovy-stuffed olives) are for eating by the handful alongside a tin of razor clams (the razor clams guide) or mussels and a small glass of something.

Kalamata. Greece's black olive, cured in brine that processors increasingly acidify with vinegar or lactic acid.

Gordal, Picholine, Niçoise, Lucques. Gordal, also called Sevillana, is a Spanish green olive cured Spanish-style like the Manzanilla. Picholine is a green table olive from the Gard in the south of France. Niçoise is the small Cailletier olive of the Nice hinterland, protected as Olive de Nice. From the Languedoc comes Lucques, a green olive with an asymmetric shape and a pit curved like a crescent moon.

Tapenade and the other olive spreads

Tapenade is Provençal, and the name comes from tapeno, the Provençal word for capers. The classic version blends black olives with capers, anchovies and olive oil into a paste. Nice's protected olive paste is Cailletier olives ground with a little oil, without the capers and anchovies that make a tapenade.

New York Shuk's matbucha with olives and mint (shop New York Shuk matbucha), a tomato-and-pepper condiment, belongs beside eggs or on a piece of bread with labneh. Villa Jerada's chermoula (shop Villa Jerada chermoula) is a Moroccan herb and spice marinade. Toss a spoonful with a jar of drained olives. Divina's olive bruschetta (shop Divina olive bruschetta) is an olive spread. Spoon it onto toast with a slice of tomato, or stir it into pasta with a little of the cooking water.

How to serve olives

Room temperature, always. A cold olive is a muted olive, so take them out of the refrigerator half an hour before guests arrive. Keep the pits in when you can and put out a saucer for them. A bowl of pits on the table is part of the ritual.

Marinating is the simplest upgrade. Drain a jar of brined olives and warm a few tablespoons of olive oil (see the olive oil buying guide) with strips of orange or lemon peel, a bruised garlic clove, a sprig of thyme or rosemary, fennel seed and a pinch of chile flakes. Pour it over the olives, let them sit an hour and serve them just above room temperature.

Pairing follows aperitivo logic. Salty, briny food wants something bitter and cold: vermouth, a dry sherry, a bitter aperitif, or, without alcohol, a sparkling tea (see the Copenhagen Sparkling Tea guide). Olives with tinned fish, cornichons, bread and a wedge of hard cheese make the Spanish and Italian pre-dinner spread in five items. The tinned fish guide and the cornichons guide take care of two of them.

Cooking with olives

In a hot pan, olives soften and season everything around them. Green olives braise well with chicken, lemon and saffron. Black olives with tomato, capers and anchovy on pasta make puttanesca (the puttanesca guide). Roast any olive alongside a whole fish or a tray of vegetables. Chopped green olives brighten a farro salad (the farro guide), and a spoon of tapenade under seared fish is a two-second sauce. Taste before salting any dish with olives in it.

Storage

Check the date on unopened jars and keep them in a cool cupboard. Once opened, keep olives in the refrigerator, covered in their brine or, if the brine is gone, in olive oil. Dry-cured olives keep best in an airtight container, which limits surface yeast and mold. Skim off any scum that forms on the brine, since molds and bacteria growing on the surface can soften the olives. Olives that look or smell strange go in the bin, untasted.

Where to start

For a crowd: Fratepietro's Cerignolas. For the aperitivo hour: Espinaler's anchovy-stuffed olives with a tin of shellfish. For a warm bowl: any brined olive, warmed in oil with orange peel. For toast: Divina's olive bruschetta. Shop the olives and tapenades collection. Products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver. Visitors can ask staff questions in the shop.

Athena won Athens by giving the city the olive tree, which remains the best review any food has received.