Cafe Liz

It’s that season: Pickling olives for another year

It’s that time of year — the first autumn rains, which mean the olives are ripe. Admittedly, I haven’t seen more than five minutes of rain in Tel Aviv so far, but it’s been on and off the weather forecast for a few weeks now. I’ve heard rumors that in some places, it actually poured. Several times.

Likewise, the olive harvest has been in full swing for a few weeks now. The trees are said to give a good crop only every two years, and this is the year. Farmers and people with trees have been picking olives by the bucket. You can comb your fingers down a branch adorned with fat olives, and they’ll come off in your hand.

For those of us in Tel Aviv, there are the trees in public parks — along the Yarkon bike paths, and along Ben Gurion Boulevard, for instance. I’ve heard some people say they actually picked olives from those trees — generally, the trees just drop their fruit all over the sidewalks, leaving a dark, greasy mess.

But the easiest way to get your hands on a batch of fresh olives is to wait until they make it into the markets. It took a while for them to get to the Carmel Market, but they appeared there this week, and in force. Continue reading It’s that season: Pickling olives for another year …

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Do-it-yourself olives, part 2

It’s been a month since my last olive post, and I have results: My latest round of olives is cured and ready to eat (well, part of it). I started with about 2 kilos of black olives. Of those, half were cured in salt, another half were pickled in brine with Mediterranean herbs, and the remainder (really, all this somehow adds up) were prepared in miso paste, like the pickles we saw at markets in Japan.

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Do-it-yourself olives

I started pickling olives quite by chance, when a friend at work brought in his surplus crop, and I found myself with half a kilo of bright green Syrian Souri olives. The results were amazing. Sadly, I think this has turned me into an olive snob, because I can’t eat the soggy things that show up alongside cafe sandwiches anymore.

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