Home-cured olives

At the Annerley Fruit Barn on Saturday, they had a big tray full of green olives. Raw ones, rock-hard, uncured, unfit for human consumption, fresh off the tree. $4.99 per kilo, they were. I was so intriuged that I had to harvest me a bag and take it home, where I inspected them thoroughly and wondered what on earth I was supposed to do now. Then I tasted one... big mistake. You haven't known pain until you have tried a raw olive. They could be weapons... culinary weapons.

So I looked up on the net what to do with them. Home-curing olives doesn't seem to be that popular, in general, as the instructions I found were few and far between, and most of them called for soaking in caustic lye or some kind of hydrogen peroxide chemical or some other commercial-type endeavour.

What about me, who just has 400 grams of olives from the fruit shop?

Finally I located some do-able instructions from some hard-core olive lady in the States.

Apparently you soak them in water, changed daily, for about 20 days. Then you soak them in a salt solution for another week or so, and make the salt solution progressively weaker. At that point they should be leached of all their bitterness and should be ready to be soaked in olive oil and have flavours and spices added. The chemical preparations just do away with all that soaking time and get the olives ready for the oil much sooner. That's OK, I have time.

So we are now into Day 3 of the soaking. The olive lady said to make a slit down one side, to allow the water to get in there and de-bitter the whole fruit. The slits have all gone brown, so I've got a soaking bowl of green rocks with brown lines on them. Mmm, appetising.

We shall see what eventuates.

***update***

I threw them out. They went all brown and slimy and festy, and I kept changing the damn water and they stayed just as slimy and hard as ever. Maybe I did something wrong.

Hmm. Will try to do better next time.