Dry Salt Cured Olives in 3 Weeks
For a few years now, I’ve been ordering from the same olive producer. When the olive harvest season begins, he sends me a WhatsApp message. I place my order, and the very next day, freshly picked olives arrive at my doorstep.
In the meantime, he sometimes sends me videos about how olives are processed. Since I’m not a fan of Spanish-style olives with lots of sauce, I usually ignored these videos. Until one day, he sent me a video about black olives. In Spain, black olives aren’t as popular as green ones, and the ones you do find are usually brined rather than dry-cured. So when I saw that the video was about sele zeytin (dry-cured black olives), I was really surprised and decided to take a look.
The process was exactly the same as mine, with one single difference: before salting, they rinsed the olives with boiling water. I had never heard of this method before. I asked around on Instagram, but no one else seemed to have tried it either. So I had no choice but to experiment myself. I thought the hot water might soften the olives, but it didn’t. It simply removed the natural waxy layer on their surface.
When making dry-cured black olives with the regular method, the olives start releasing their liquid drop by drop after a few days. With this method, they began dripping water the very next day! The process went so quickly that the olives were ready to eat in just three weeks. What’s more, I didn’t lose a single olive to bruising or spoilage, which used to happen occasionally before.
In short, this has now become my standard method for making sele zeytin. And since it worked so well, I wanted to share it with you too.
Enjoy!
Instructions:
- Remove the stems and discard any damaged or wormy olives,
- Wash and drain the olives,
- Pour about 2 liters of boiling water over them, then drain immediately,
- Pat them dry with a clean kitchen towel,
- Place them in a cloth bag, sprinkling salt between each handful,
- Tie the bag, hang it in a high place, and place a basin underneath to collect the liquid,
- Every day, shake the bag so the olives move around, and open it to check their condition,
- The next day, they’ll start releasing liquid,
- Continue this daily shaking and checking process until all the liquid drains and the bitterness is gone (you can start tasting once they begin to wrinkle), which takes about three weeks,
- Rinse the olives (you can soak them if you want them less salty), pat them dry, and spread them out in open air or sunlight until completely dry,
- Divide them into jars, add a few tablespoons of sunflower oil on top, seal the lids, and shake until all the olives are coated, or store them in freezer bags in the freezer.
Bon appétit!