An Olive's Journey to the Table
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The Orchard
Olive trees grow best in a Mediterranean-like climate–warm, sunny, and arid. Olives are grown commercially in many countries, including Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Peru, Australia, and the United States. California's olive country is home to DeLallo’s olive curing facility and to the orchards where our partner farmers tend their crop. Olive trees can live and bear fruit for hundreds of years. Many trees producing fruit now in California are more than a hundred years old–young by European standards.
Picked by Hand
Olives are easily bruised and must be handled gently, especially table olives.
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Harvest
Different olive varieties are harvested at different stages of ripeness. The harvest of table olives in California begins in mid-September and continues until late october.
When olives are picked they are hard, bitter, and inedible. They can be green, straw-colored, brown, purple, or black, depending on the variety and how ripe they are when picked. Our California Sevillano olives are all hand picked and straw green when ripe at harvest.
Sevillano Facts:
- Originally brought to California from Spain by missionaries.
- Known for its large size, crisp texture, and buttery-tart flavor.
- Very large fruit, bluish-black when ripe.
- Harvesteded straw-green color for curing
- Low oil content, ideal for making Sicilian style salt brine cured olives.
- Ideal for stuffing because of its size and firmness
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Sorting, Preparation, & Brining
When the olives reach the curing facility, they are de-stemmed, and any stray twigs and leaves are removed. The olives are sorted for color, quality, and size, then placed in tanks full of brine.
Brine is a salt-water solution that helps the olive’s natural sugars convert to lactic acid, changing the hard, bitter olive into a delicious fruit. Olives are brined for 9 to 16 months. Their caretakers check the tanks for salinity and circulate the olives periodically so that they cure evenly. Curing is a hands-on, artisanal process, a labor of love by people who care about olives.
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Curing Styles
Olives as they come from the tree are inedible without some kind of curing. There are many curing styles used for olives around the world, each producing different colors, tastes, and textures.
DeLallo’s Sevillano olives are cured using:
- Sicilian-Curing, in which the green olives are cured and preserved in salt brine and lactic acid. Olives have finished curing when sugars are sufficiently converted.
In addition to the Sicilian style that results in DeLallo’s crisp green Sevillano olives, some other popular curing methods include:
- Salt-Curing, in which the fully tree-ripened olives are packed in salt; then coated/preserved in olive oil;
- Sun-Drying, in which tree-ripened olives are spread out to cure in the sunshine until they have attained a wrinkled appearance and pleasantly bitter tang.
- Lye Cut, in which, typically Spanish, green olives are treated with a lye solution to partially de-bitter the olive. (American canned black ripe olives)
While curing an olive can take several months, it is a very basic process that people have been doing since ancient times.
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The Finished Olive
When the olives have finished curing, they are removed from the brine tanks and packed for shipping. What those olives look and taste like depends on their variety and curing style. They may vary in color from golden green to deepest purple black; in texture from crisp to soft and wrinkled.
Olives share a long and honored history, and DeLallo brings that tradition–many centuries of love and respect for good food–to your table.
Table Olives are those intended to be eaten-as a cured fruit. Opposed to crushed for oil.
From the tree to the table, an olive's journey ends deliciously. Learn where olives come from, how they are harvested and how the curing process changes the olive from hard and bitter to a savory delight.
