Come October on the streets of Palermo foodstands start offering several raw, just picked olive varietals, amongst which city housewives prefer the green olive Castelvetrano, as they call the Nocellara del Belice variety up there, to cure for their families. To do so you need only purified water and a jar. Cover your olives in water and keep changing the water every day. This is the most natural, traditional way of curing olives. Whole green and with pits. However, as it takes a while for the olives to give up their innate bitterness, a small group of impatient fanatics amongst us has grown to love them just days into the curing, which yields a flavor like no other…and can’t keep their hands off those jars long enough for them to reach their sweeter stage which would be no less than 3 weeks later.

Most sane and disciplined people though will prepare them in the following manner: take purified water and 6% sea salt (ideally fine crystals) which you gradually increase to 10% over 10 days by adding a pinch day by day to the water in which you have placed your olives (that is start with 5L of water and 300g of salt, then add another 200g of salt from day 2 to day 10). The water must cover all olives plus a couple of inches, and they are best cured in a glass jar of which you don’t tightly close the lid allowing for oxygen to get inside and start the fermentation process. Do not wash the fruit either, just quickly rinse with cold water, since preserving the microorganisms on their skins is essential for the curing. On a weekly basis you must check the salinity of the brine which you can do with a special device found at some chemists or online (Baumé method). Keep the percentage at 10% over 3 months. These olives will be ready for consumption starting about then. It is always best to keep the mother brine as opposed to straining the olives and putting them into a new “clean” 10% salt water brine. The amber color and moldy-looking particles in the original solution may not look pretty but they are the living basis which will guarantee shelf-life to your product. At that point you can also close the lid properly, in fact you must. Simply open the container to lift out just the amount of freshly-cured olives you intend to serve that day. If brushed with a bit of olive oil, these withdrawn olives will last up to 4 days at room temperature and hold up to 7 days refridgerated. These olives are called plain olive acqua e sale.

Variations on this natural brine, salamoia al naturale, theme include the cracking of the raw olives before placing them into the brine. To obtain olive schiacciate use a meat pounder but with a light touch to avoid squashing the pulp out; or if you are planning an olive curing business look at old-school stone-crackers which help split masses of olives, or at a specific slicer meant to do just that, cut into the olives just to allow for more thorough penetration of the brine and homogenous curing, read no softening around the pit, yet no cracking nor splitting. The addition of dry fennel seeds to the brine is also contemplated, for a subtle flavoring which will keep your friends and family guessing. Other ingredients are best left out at that stage to prevent spoilage. You can always season your olives later, once they are done, a few hours or so before serving with fresh or dry herbs, olive oil, spices, vinegar, chopped carrots… what you would call marinading. The plainer your marinade, the longer these olives will hold. In Castelvetrano we preserve our olives whole, making sure the start-out water was truly demineralized from the bottle and the empty jar sterilized so that the skin does not wrinkle nor the flesh soften around the pit (the mushy effect accountable for the many olive-haters out there). This would happen by contamination or too high a mineral content. We then remove them from their brine as we need, and crack them before seasoning with Nocellara olive oil, a bit of minced red Nubia garlic, and some chopped parsley leaves. We sometimes substitute the parsley with celery leaves and add bits of carrot and a touch of vinegar to this mix. Some people also add chili pepper. This, give or take a few, would be our true  all natural old-timer Castelvetrano curing and seasoning style (alive cunzate). The particularity of these olives, whose green color is deep and slightly dark, almost kakhi, is that they retain a slightly bitter taste, which lessens with time, the longer the olives stay in the brine. By the way, they can spend up to 2 years in their brine as long as you remember to keep the salt-content at 10% or little below. Should you have oversalted, soak the olives you are planning to serve in fresh or under running water to remove as much salt as possible, as you would do with salt-packed capers.

These days though Castelvetrano olives is the common name by which, what we would call sweetened olives, olive dolcificate, go. This other curing method is nothing but an industrial way of fast-sweetening the fruit (removing the olive’s naturally bitter flavor or deamarizzazione process). A certain amount of caustic soda also known as lye is added to water and the olives are bathed in it for 24 hours. After that they are rinsed in clear water a number of times, and they stay put, all bright green and shiny forever. No further fermentation, nothing. Everyone knows these olives as they are the classic cocktail or martini olive, also known as napoletana in Italy because Castelvetrano’s nocellara main buyers are Neapolitan companies. Buyers who repackage them will pay a higher price based on the olive’s caliber: the larger the better, and just for fun, here is the scale they are measured after – large L, extra large XL, jumbo, extrajumbo, kolossal, superkolossal, mammut, supermammut! They are sold to endusers in clear water or salt-and-water brine. Most bright green, whole, very firm to crunchy olives on the market have undergone this particular curing process.

In Castelvetrano olive curing factories also employ the following procedure: concia alla sevigliana or olive sivigliana, as both names are often used. This implies a first 12H bath in water and lye, then lots of rinsing, and fermentation in a water and salt brine. The color of these olives is darker green with a slight yellow tinge to it. The brine which can be seen through the clear glass jars in which they are sold, is somewhat orangey and luminous. Obviously their flavor is part natural, retaining a faint bitterness, and part sweet (no, not sugary, sweet as in not bitter). Most seasoned olives or pitted and stuffed olives sold in wats at olive bars around the world were cured this way.

Last but not least, the story with riper olives. Well, olives go through a short red then purple phase before they turn black. If red or early-purple and still somewhat firm, one can cure these olives whole in a salt & water brine (salamoia al naturale or acqua e sale). This results in olive nere which is a generic term for black olives, nothing more. If already somewhat soft, black and threatening to burst when harvested, olives cannot be placed in liquid but have to go through what is called a dry curing process. This can be of varying nature.  The straightest: put  black olives in a colander, sprinkle large amounts of sea salt, medium-coarse. Toss without touching the olives nor using any tools (what do you call that shaking move again, sautéing? hardly applies here, right?). Cover with a towel and store at room temperature, above a basin of some sort to capture any dripping. Do the same every day for 2 to 3 weeks, till the olives have leaked most of their moisture. Rinse. Allow to drain and dry. Place in a glass jar only filling it halfway up to avoid squeezing and bursting.  Close the lid. Pastorize. Store for as long as you can resist. Make small-sized jars as they do not keep long after opening even when refrigerated. Some extra reddish-black juice will coat the bottom of the glass inside: this is entirely normal and does not affect the final product. We call these olives passuluna and at Ballarò market in Palermo they are called olive al fiore. The variety best used for this curing method is olive giaraffa or large nocellara (yes, mammouth). Gianfranco Becchina also loves to serve them as follows (that’s the Becchina freshly cured black olive recipe): he rinses them quickly, less then 4 hours after picking them, and places them on a baking sheet adding nothing to them at all before putting them into the oven for another 2 to 3 hours at the lowest possible heat. When this happens, every member of Tenuta Pignatelli estate, every guest, patron or passerby, is invited to this simple feast, for this is a rare, truly luxurious experience. These black no-salt passuluna olives really melt on your tongue! Quite a time-consuming affair, this requires concentration and no distractions, so as not to miss the perfect cooking point. Sweet and soft, yet plumped up and still warm, they are best eaten straight out of the oven, or no later than a couple of hours down the road. Which pretty much gives you the operative timeframe: pick that morning, bake the same afternoon and enjoy as appetizers before dinner. What is more, or worse depending on the point of view: since olives on trees ripen to black quite suddenly sometimes, when the season’s warm or there are more than 3 very sunny days in a row, the risk for the olive fly to lay its eggs in the tender fruit increases. That’s why living on the olive plantation pretty much ensures daily supervision of this state of affairs and makes it possible to collect untreated black olives at just the right point. It has happened that we’ve missed the mark in the past, and found extra protein in our cured black olives, but the effort is such, that in those cases we all pretended, grownups and kids alike, we hadn’t seen, nor felt anything foreign under our bite. No alternatives to perfect timing, and a certain contemplative attitude, or the product just won’t be the same.

Yet, when it comes to black olives and mankind’s thirst for this delicacy, people have proven quite inventive. Typical shortcuts would be: picking olives still green (or reddish), pitting them (only when green from the onset), softening them in a lye bath, adding black coloring (your classic medium-sized black pitted olive in a jar, not to point our finger at any specific varieties nor geographical origins); or pick potentially pesticide-treated olives when black, sprinkle with salty water, toast in curing oven, and package. Et voilà, madame est servie.

Last but not least, there is a hybrid and all too rare cured olive, a pink one, which can sometimes be found around Castelvetrano and here alone. Whole, brine-cured sevigliana style, not too firm, not too soft, it is delicious, but given that it is neither here nor there, it doesn’t have a market in Sicily, let alone in the big wide world. Considering also that it must be picked in the shortest window of time, when most olives on a tree are still green and a few have already turned black, making harvesting logistics and costs impossibly high and too much to bear for the weak economy, which, in the end, our small, olive growing, farming comunity here in the Valle del Belice struggles with, this pink Nocellara del Belice olive will remain a very local, hard-to-find speciality.   - GaB