Cooking
Olives are one of the foods I’ve avoided for a very long time. They pop up from time to time in a salad, pizza or other dish ordered in a restaurant, but I typically pull them out before I start eating and pass them over to someone who appreciates them. I don’t think I had ever tried anything other than the basic green and black grocery store varieties until this evening.
My grocery store has an olive bar, so I decided that this would be a good way to sample several varieties without spending too much. Many of the olives at the olive bar were unnamed large green olives with various stuffings, others were labeled “assorted”, and unfortunately quite a few had no label at all. I picked out a small selection – I went for the ones that had a specific name and then picked one of the stuffed ones as well. I ended up with Niçoise, Picholine, Moroccan oil-cured, and one stuffed with sun-dried tomato. I had a total of 8 olives and they cost me a whopping 24 cents!
When I got home, I poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed a big glass of ice water, and began my taste test. Obviously the most noticeable thing about olives is that they are salty. In fact, to my unpracticed palate they are so salty that it is difficult to differentiate one from another by taste. The two characteristics that I could distinguish were the degree of saltiness and the texture. The Moroccan oil-cured olive was very soft and incredibly salty – pretty awful. The Niçoise and Picholine olives were similar to each other in saltiness, but the Picholine olive was much firmer than the Niçoise. The large stuffed olive was somewhere between the Niçoise and Picholine in texture, but similar to both in saltiness. I preferred the Niçoise and Picholine olives over the others.
After I finished eating the olives, I read a little about them. I found out Moroccan oil-cured olives are considered bitter and better for cooking then snacking. Maybe I should have done a little research before I went to the olive bar!
The olive bar is nice in that it allows you to buy a selection of different olives at low cost and, if desired, in small quantities, but the downside is that you know very little about what you’re getting. So now they question is, am I ready to commit to a whole jar of olives? Guess I could always put them out for company…
left - Picholine, top middle - stuffed, bottom middle - niçoise, right - Moroccan oil-cured
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- Egg + Olives = Eggola
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Photo by Melissa Schneider. An olive grove sits across one border of the orange farm my family owns, gray-green spiderwebs facing dark green puffs across a wide stretch of light tan dirt. Once, when I was "helping" with farmwork—a ten-year-old...
Cooking
Trying New Things: Olives
Olives are one of the foods I’ve avoided for a very long time. They pop up from time to time in a salad, pizza or other dish ordered in a restaurant, but I typically pull them out before I start eating and pass them over to someone who appreciates them. I don’t think I had ever tried anything other than the basic green and black grocery store varieties until this evening.
My grocery store has an olive bar, so I decided that this would be a good way to sample several varieties without spending too much. Many of the olives at the olive bar were unnamed large green olives with various stuffings, others were labeled “assorted”, and unfortunately quite a few had no label at all. I picked out a small selection – I went for the ones that had a specific name and then picked one of the stuffed ones as well. I ended up with Niçoise, Picholine, Moroccan oil-cured, and one stuffed with sun-dried tomato. I had a total of 8 olives and they cost me a whopping 24 cents!
When I got home, I poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed a big glass of ice water, and began my taste test. Obviously the most noticeable thing about olives is that they are salty. In fact, to my unpracticed palate they are so salty that it is difficult to differentiate one from another by taste. The two characteristics that I could distinguish were the degree of saltiness and the texture. The Moroccan oil-cured olive was very soft and incredibly salty – pretty awful. The Niçoise and Picholine olives were similar to each other in saltiness, but the Picholine olive was much firmer than the Niçoise. The large stuffed olive was somewhere between the Niçoise and Picholine in texture, but similar to both in saltiness. I preferred the Niçoise and Picholine olives over the others.
After I finished eating the olives, I read a little about them. I found out Moroccan oil-cured olives are considered bitter and better for cooking then snacking. Maybe I should have done a little research before I went to the olive bar!
The olive bar is nice in that it allows you to buy a selection of different olives at low cost and, if desired, in small quantities, but the downside is that you know very little about what you’re getting. So now they question is, am I ready to commit to a whole jar of olives? Guess I could always put them out for company…
left - Picholine, top middle - stuffed, bottom middle - niçoise, right - Moroccan oil-cured
- California Olive Ranch Extra Virgin Olive Oil
It all comes down to freshness and quantity. California Olive Ranch plants three varieties, arbequina, arbosana from Spain and koroneiki from Greece. Their olive orchards look nothing like what you may have seen in Europe. The olive trees are pruned...
- Crazy For Conservas
When I think of processed foods the first things that come to mind are newfangled convenience and artificial ingredients. But that's not the case with all processed foods. In Spain, preserving vegetables and seafood is a very traditional craft....
- Fig, Onion And Black Olive Tapenade:recipe
I get a lot of good ideas from reading Craigslist Food Forum. Recently I read about an olive fig tapenade that people seem to be raving about. Needing an appetizer that could survive for a few hours without refrigeration, I figured it would fit the bill....
- Egg + Olives = Eggola
“I’d like an eggola martini, dirty.” Photo by Melissa SchneiderLast December, Melissa and I went to a holiday party/potluck at Jack and Joanne’s house. Among many great dishes, two struck my “reproduce at home” nerve:...
- Home-cured Olives
Photo by Melissa Schneider. An olive grove sits across one border of the orange farm my family owns, gray-green spiderwebs facing dark green puffs across a wide stretch of light tan dirt. Once, when I was "helping" with farmwork—a ten-year-old...