With a bit of luck and lots of sunshine, you may be able to harvest fresh olives from your home-grown olive tree after a few years. You might also get a bunch of unprocessed olives as a gift, bring them back from vacation, or buy them in a Turkish or Italian grocery store. But no matter how you get hold of fresh olives, the question is always: what do I do with them?

Fresh olives too bitter to eat raw

First of all, unprocessed olives are inedible. They taste extremely bitter, which is why any bitter substances have to be removed from them before you can enjoy them. This is usually done by soaking and preserving the olives in water and/or brine for weeks. Caustic soda is also used primarily in the processing industry. In view of this, it makes little sense to freeze fresh olives - you can't use them immediately after thawing anyway, you have to go through the procedure described beforehand. You can save yourself the freezing right away.

Frozen olives change the taste and appearance

In addition, olives - whether fresh or pickled - are among the foods whose taste and appearance suffer from freezing. The fruits lose a lot of juice and bite, instead they become mushy and chewy. The taste also gets an unpleasant rancid note. Olives are very oil-rich fruits - which is why they are also called "oil fruits" - and like any oil, olive oil becomes rancid and flaky from cold. More specifically, the freezing itself is not the problem, rather the thawing. Thawing oil - and thus also the oil in oil-rich fruits - breaks down very quickly into its components and thus loses its aroma.

How then can olives be preserved?

Instead, olives can be wonderfully preserved by pickling them for up to 24 months. After debittering, the fruits are placed in brine and thus preserved. The preserved fruit can either remain in the brine or placed in an airtight container and filled with a good vegetable oil - such as olive oil or sunflower oil - so that it is completely covered.

Types of preservation of olives

  • Pickling in brine
  • Pickling in vegetable oil (olive or sunflower oil)
  • dry pickling by curing

tips and tricks

Make sure that your pickled olives (as well as any olive oil) get little or no sunlight. This leads to oxidation, which affects the taste and appearance of the fruit, but also reduces the shelf life.

The garden journal freshness ABC

How can fruit and vegetables be stored correctly so that they stay fresh for as long as possible?

The garden journal freshness ABC as a poster:

  • as a free PDF file to print out yourself

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Trees