Olive Pickling
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Pick the olives, grouping by color: all green, all red, or black.
Dissolve the lye in a small amount of boiling water.
Soak and rinse
Submerge the olives in the lye solution for 3 days, stirring several times daily.
Soak the olives in fresh water for 4 days, changing the water at least twice daily.
Brine
When the bitterness is gone, cover the olives with brine made from 1 pint of salt to 1 gallon of water, ensuring all olives are submerged.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Olives
- The fruit being treated; its bitterness is removed so it can be eaten.
- Concentrated lye
- Breaks down the bitter compounds in the raw olive flesh during the soak.
- Salt
- Forms the brine that preserves the olives after the bitterness is removed.
The step that matters
Rinsing out the lye. Lye keeps working on the olives until it is washed out. Changing the fresh water often removes leftover lye and dissolved bitter compounds, so the olives do not taste harsh or caustic when the bitterness is gone.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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