How to cure fresh #olives – it's actually quite easy! #urbanfarming #gardening #growyourownfood

Today I'm going to cure my olives from my two little olive trees. I bought two little olive trees and planted them in the front yard about two years ago and I got a few olives. Although they said these were non-bearing, non-fruit bearing olive trees. But anyways, I'm kind of happy and delighted to have these beautiful olives now. So I had to go online and research a little bit what to do with these olives because apparently you cannot eat them right from the tree because they're very bitter. So I found a number of different sites and had to make a decision because I only have these few little olives here. Everything was for larger quantities. People were like doing massive amounts and talking about, you know, one point or three quarter cups of salt for so many liters of water. Well, I finally found one site that said you can pickle them or cure them rather in jars, in curing jars. So that that sounded really good and that's what I'm going to do. It talked about using one teaspoon of salt with one cup of water and to slip the olives because that would speed up the process. So this may be a little bit messy. I got my knife ready here and I'm going to put slits in the olives just once all the way around. I only have about maybe a dozen of them here. A couple of them I already did. So you can see I have some salt here, all natural sea salt it says. I've had this for a long time. I don't use salt much but for curing these olives you need salt. And then I have a mason jar on the left as you can see and a stone and the stone needs to be used to weigh the olives down when they're in the water because otherwise they float up. So I got everything ready here and the first thing I'll after this I'll do I'll dissolve the one teaspoon or maybe a little bit less of the salt in some water. Okay so that's good. Some salt. Take a teaspoon and put it in the jar. And then add a little water and stir it to dissolve the salt. That's good. Then I'm going to add the olives in and maybe a little bit more water. And then comes the stone but I don't want to put the stones straight on it. I cut a yogurt cup that fits into the jar. It fits nicely like this and then put the rock on top. Hopefully this will work. Good. Looks good. So the olives are now at the bottom there in the salt brine. Then I'm going to put the lid on it and this part is done. It says to store in room temperature. Now all of the different sources said to check after a week to change the brine. It's called the salt brine. To change it. So some of them said to change it every two days after or for a week but the person who talked about the curing it in the jar said check it after 7 to 12 days and replace the brine and and then after that leave it for five weeks. That sounds a lot better than having to change it like once a week after that. So I guess I'm set for a week with this and then I will change it after about five weeks. I should mark the lid or mark it on my calendar and then it said after the five weeks taste one of the olives and if they still taste bitter then you have to change the brine and leave it for another maybe eight to nine weeks. Anyways he says after 15 weeks they should be fine and maybe even earlier. It depends on how they taste to you. So whatever tastes good they're done and then after that you can add you rinse again. Rinse all this salt off and after that you can add spices and a little white wine vinegar maybe a little olive oil. So I learned a whole lot about olives studying all this material and maybe you're like me you have some old things in the refrigerator food that you don't want to touch and olives I had a jar of olives there I don't know how long it's been there. I didn't want to throw it out but I also didn't want to eat it but now I know that well olives don't seem to expire at all the longer they sit the better they get almost. It's not exactly true but so I decided to just rinse off the olives that were in that jar and put them in a new jar with some spring water and some spices. I had some basil and a little vinegar and they taste just wonderful. So I had about six of them for my lunch and they're very good so I'm glad I was able to rescue this jar of olives also at the same time. Okay I hope this inspired you if you have an olive tree save your olives and cure them and enjoy them. Have a wonderful day!