March has been a crazy month, I am super happy to say hello to April. Our van has broken down, it has rained biblically for weeks & the temperature is completely off the chart, you can’t dress correctly at any point, its freezing cold & howling a gale or the sun is shining & your shoulders are burning. I have had both sun burn & wind burn this month… This is the moment in the beginning of the year when the olives from the last harvest are almost ready for eating, it is time to start testing the jars to see how much longer we have to wait to dive into the delicacies that the land so kindly gifts us every Winter.
When we arrived on the land the only mature fruit trees that we had were olives, oranges, quince & some pears. The pears are yet to bear us any fruit so I presume they are sick / not pears after all, the quince does really well every year, the oranges are delicious & the olives need a lot of maintenance but we have managed to harvest for oil twice since living here. We maintain & harvest all of them by hand to respect the trees as much as possible, I am learning more about them each year. From a nutritional point of view, they are very rich in fat, mostly monounsaturated, and also high in antioxidants and vitamins (A, C and E).
Olives were brought to this region around the 1st century BC, by the Phoenecians or Greeks at the same time as they were introduced in Spain. Apparently the oldest surviving olive tree is in Mouriscas, they believe it to be over 3000 years old. Absolutely incredible!
I have cured olives every Winter since we moved here & I have 2 methods that I will be happy to share with you here, one is salted & the other is the tested method used by the locals of washing in water a lot before brining them. I am not sure about the variety of our olives, some are small, some are big, green, black & a few colours in between. Somebody told me they are mostly Galegas in this area, which I think are the small black ones, they are so delicious we eat them with almost every meal once the pantry is full of jars in the Winter.
“Portuguese cuisine is simple and tasty, focusing on good quality ingredients that are made with love and more importantly in VERY generous quantities!”
I basically live in my LUCY&YAK dungarees, they are not the most hardy material but they are so comfy!
When we harvest the olives for eating we pick them before they are 100% ripe when we pick them for the oil, this helps the olives to stay firm in the curing process. We choose the best ones for curing by removing all of the olives that are mouldy, dry or with worms. We get a lot of olive fly here in Portugal so it is important to get all of these out, but if you miss a few then its ok, more protein right!
We start by washing the olives in water for 3-4 weeks, changing the water as often as you can, daily to begin with, then less as the time passes. This helps to remove the tannins from the olives which takes away the bitter taste, it is a long process, you can wash them for longer if you like or you can make cuts into the olives to speed up the process, some people also leave the olives in a pillowcase in a river, the flowing water is probably the best for this process, but we don’t often have a river running through our land so I do this in buckets to begin with.
When the water is not totally dirty the olives are ready for flavouring
My favourite is to make a 10% brine ( 10% of salt to water ratio ) & then flavour the jars accordingly, I like a few different flavours so here are some I tend to make.
lemon peel, garlic, chilli
orange peel, bay, chilli
lemon peel & rosemary
orange peel, chilli & oregano
You can flavour them with whatever you wish, I will be trying some new recipes this year using some other herbs in the garden like lemon thyme, cinnamon, orange thyme, cumin, coriander seeds & other citrus fruits if we manage to grow them.
These jars are then left on the shelf for around 6 months before they are cured & ready to eat. I hope you get some time to make them for yourself if olive trees are abundant near you, if not I would be happy to send you a jar! Just leave me a comment :D
A month after this we can harvest the olives for pressing into olive oil. Something we have loved doing the past few years, olive oil prices are soaring around the world & we feel so blessed that we are able to produce our own olive oil from our land. Knowing the trees have been taken care of as best as we can, not fed any nasty chemicals & then are pressed in a cold press machine locally. It can not be beaten & I would love you to try this some day!
It is now the beginning of Spring & I am pruning the olive trees gently in preparation for flowering. We have around 35 trees on our land, which is enough for 2 people to collect & press the olives for a decent amount of olive oil. We use olive oil with almost every meal & since we run a pizza business we are proud to use our homemade oil on the pizzas as well, which gives them a unique twist. We probably get through about 25 litres of oil per year, easily. We try to harvest & press at least this amount each Autumn, we take the olives to a local cold press & pay for them by the kilo to be pressed into the green liquid gold that is extra virgin olive oil. It is not super expensive but it does take a week or so to harvest the olives & you can sometimes be waiting in line for yours to be put to the press for hours/days at a time. Some Portuguese sleep in the line so they don’t miss out, they bring their food, their wine & they enjoy the slow pace of just waiting until it’s done. I absolutely love this tradition but it is a test of patience, something we could really learn from the locals as we seem to have lost this coming from the UK.
Sometimes I like to make olive paste or I use our cured olives on our pizzas too, if you are interested in our tiny business you can find us on Facebook using the link below.
Thanks so much for reading along with me this week, sorry that the post came a little late this week as I was hoping to share it last Friday but like I said, March is just crazy!
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