Preparing Olives

 

So, it’s been a little bit manic this month and honestly I haven’t actually spent that much time on the island, which makes a huge change from the norm.

Last week I went to the UK with some friends from Greece, they had never been to England before, and well, I went along as a tour guide. We stayed at my parent’s house, which meant that a huge amount of Greek produce was off loaded on them! One of the things which they where given was fresh green olives, quite literally off the tree.

As my father can tell you, eating an olive directly of the tree is not the same as eating an apple or and orange, they are as bitter as hell and require some treatment before one can even consider putting one anywhere near ones mouth.

Preparing the Olives is pretty simple so much so that I thought that you might like to know how its done, just on the off chance that you run into an olive tree at the right time of year!

First off you need to pick the olives, these olives where picked just before they turned black. Then you need to clean them and cut a cross into both ends.

To do this you are going to need two very basic ingredients other than the olives of course. These ingredients are water and salt. You will also need an egg but that is not for consumption just so that you know how much salt to add – you will need A LOT of salt!

Take a large bowl and fill it with room temperature water, poor in about 2 tablespoons of salt and stir until all the salt is dissolved (it is best to use rock salt). Then take the egg and put it into the water, you will need to keep adding salt until the egg lifts off the bottom of the bowl.

Once the egg lifts you will have succeeded in making brine. Put the Olive into a jar and poor the brine over the top. You need to make sure that the olives are completely covered by the brine, by doing this you will be able to keep them in this jar (provided they are always covered by brine) for about a year.

It really is as easy as that! When it come to serving you simply take them out of the jar put them into a bowel and squeeze some lemon juice over the top. If like me you are not such a great fan of salt you can rinse them off before adding the lemon. 

Olive Oil Production

Olive oil production is quite fascinating. From the day that the olives are harvested they have two to three days weather dependant – brilliant sunshine gives less time, overcast a little bit more time – to process the olives. This is due to the fact that the longer it takes to process the olives the higher the acidity becomes. The olives arrive by truck, van, car and sometimes even donkey and cart at the factory.

 (Sacks are stored with the family name of the farmer to avoid confusion)

The olives are off loaded and stored on pallets waiting their turn to be crushed and pressed into green gold. 

 (Loved the reuse of the bags!)

Once they have reached the front of the queue they are poured out of their cosy sacks and the process starts. First they must enter the system, a conveyor belt of sorts is the first hurdle. This conveyor belt takes them from the outer factory in to the processing side at the same time it gives them their first bath separating the olives from the leaves.

The system spits the leaves out into a barn where they are collected to be used for other purposes.

The next machine in line scoops the olives up and using high pressured jets and a constant shaking motion washes them again, this time it’s to remove any bugs or dirt which may have decided to come along for the ride.

The freshly washed olives are then fed into what can only be described as a giant tapenade machine, which gently heats them up and crushes them. Quite literally making a murky coloured tapenade, this machine is also responsible for pressing the olives and then filtering any small flesh and pip particals out. 

The pip and pressed flesh is, like the leaves, spat out by the system into a rather large mound on the outside of the factory. Like the leaves nothing is wasted and this waste now has two uses.  One it is taken away as it still contains olive oil, another factory will now use it after further processing for products such a soap and detergents. Two the processing plant needs energy to heat up the giant tapenade machine so rather than using a huge amount of electricity to make this possible the waste is used as a fuel.

By the time it has reached the end of the system fluorescent green oil is pouring out. This will now be tested for acidity and stored in giant vats where it will settle and become transparent with a hint of green.

It can take some farmers two to three months to bring in all of their olives and process them into oil. Most will sell it to the processing factory who in turn sell it on to major buyers. Some farmers have ventured into business themselves and sell it directly to major food traders around the world.  The Sitia olive oil has been known to turn up in some pretty far flung places. My parents have found Sitian olive oil as far a field as a Norwegian skiing chalet surrounded by kilometres and kilometres of snow!

Over the last decade or so olive groves have been abandoned by their owners who have left in favour of life in the city, good jobs and easy money. However with everything that is going on within this sun blessed country, there has been a noticeable number of old abandoned olive groves being rejuvenated and brought back to production as people leave the cities in favour of a calmer, slower and more reliable country life.

The Olive Harvest

Last December my family came to Crete to spend some time with us. I should at this point introduce my family, they are not normal … despite that fact that I live on a Greek island which the gods of sunshine have blessed with 300 days of sun a year, they are not content to sit around and take in the rays … Oh no not them. We must be doing something from dawn to dusk, it doesn’t matter what, it could be running, cycling, swimming, walking gorges, anything but it must happen and it must keep them out of trouble!

I am lucky in the sense that I have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of people here and for one reason or another my husband and I have been taken into many families which is lovely and gives us a different insight into life on the Island. 

December is harvest time for Olives, almost every Greek in Greece has a few olive trees.  Some people, like everything in life, have a few more than others. In Greece olive oil is green gold. The farmers work all year to ensure that their trees are happy and producing a good crop, Mother Nature has a huge hand to play here but she seems to shine down on the Island’s trees and they lap up her rays.

Olive oil is an interesting and complex product. There are many different varieties of olives in the areas surrounding Sitia the Koroneki variety is predominant. The olive is a lot smaller than the typical olive but it produces the best oil.  As you will have no doubt seen in the supermarket there are many different qualities of olive oil ranging from extra virgin cold pressed (the best) to plain olive oil.

To cut a very long story short the quality of olive oil is worked out through its percentage of acidity. The lower the acidity the better the oil. For example 0.2% to 0.8% acidity is considered extra virgin olive oil – this is the olive oil that you use in salads, never, let a Greek catch you using it to cook with, you will be hung drawn and quartered!  Then comes virgin olive oil this is 0.9% to 1.5% acidity and plain olive oil is 1.6% to 3%.  After that it becomes thick and gooey and is generally used for frying chips or in more modern times as bio fuel for cars.

Olive Oil with an acidity of 0.3% to 0.4% is considered the very best of the best and is highly sought after. Sitia and the surrounding area are extremely famous for their extra virgin olive oil, so much so that other countries buy the oil directly from the farmers and mix it with their own to bring the acidity of their oil down thereby giving them the right to use the Extra Virgin Olive Oil classification.  It is then marketed to the masses and ends up in supermarkets all over the world.

My family decided that they wanted to know more about the production of olive oil, they are always up for learning a bit more about the area which they are in. Thankfully it was harvest time and anyone who has olive trees will tell you that when it comes to the back breaking labour intensive harvest, the more hands that they can muster the merrier. Laughing at the fact that he thought my family – myself included but not my husband who knew better – were up for a challenge Manolis, a friend of ours, offered us the day out picking his olives. I think he thought that the sun had gone to our heads and that we were quite crazy to volunteer for the harvest, he normally pays his teams to bring in the olives. That should have been warning enough!

Harvesting the olives is a relatively simple task, nets are rolled out under the trees to catch the olives as they fall. The trees are then shaken or beaten with paddles to knock the olives off. These days modern technology has caught up with the process and most farmers have long poles with a turning head covered in long soft plastic wires, the tool resembles more an instrument of torture than anything else.  It is, however, extremely effective at the job for which it was designed. This machine is plugged into a very noisy generator, the power spins the heads which in turn knock the olives from their perch and along with the olives comes half a ton of leaves… But its not quite that simple, when you have all these machines working from different angles on the same tree you have olives flying in just about every direction imaginable - up, down, left and right and if you’re unfortunate the occasional olive has been known to whack you in the face with such intensity you feel like you have been rather viciously hit with a paint ball gun.

The main olive gathering team is split into two, one team knocks them off and the other separates the leaves from the olives and bags the olives up to be processed. Both teams work as hard and fast as humanly possible, the more they harvest the more they are paid. This meant that the family and I were not exactly helpful in the beginning! First we had to learn who did what. My brother being a young ox of a man was whisked off to batter the olives from the tree, the folks and I were put on gathering duty. Two Albanian ladies who were extremely professional and rather quick looked us up and down and gave us about two minutes of their time, we then set about the job - the three of us doing the work of one of them! 

It’s not that it’s hard work but it’s labour intensive, you spend the best part of the day doubled over and if, like us you’re not used to it, your back very quickly starts to complain. The olives might be small but when they’re all in one sack they weigh an absolute ton and the machines which knock them off the trees might well be light when you pick them up but when you’re holding these things for a while they start to get quite heavy. 

As the day went on we started to get the job done quite quickly and very soon we were almost as good as everyone else, almost as good but not quite up to their lightning standards. By the end of our time out in the fields the team had gathered well over a hundred bags. These were hauled up onto a truck to be taken to the processing factory where five kilos of raw product would become one kilo of olive oil. 

PROCESSING OLIVE OIL TO FOLLOW ...