Content
- Better not freeze olives
- Fresh olives too raw to bitter
- Frozen olives change their taste and appearance
- How can you preserve olives?
- Types of preservation of olives
- Tips & Tricks
Better not freeze olives
With a bit of luck and lots of sunshine, you may be able to harvest fresh olives from your home-grown olive tree after a few years. You may also get a sweep of unprocessed olives, take them out of your holiday, or buy them in a Turkish or Italian grocery store. But whatever way you get to fresh olives, the question is always: what do I do with it?
Fresh olives too raw to bitter
First of all, unprocessed olives are inedible. They taste extremely bitter, which is why they have to be deprived of any bitter substances before being enjoyed. Usually, this is done by weeks of loading and preserving the olives in water and / or brine. Caustic soda is also used primarily in the processing industry. In view of this, it does not make much sense to freeze fresh olives - you can not use them immediately after defrosting, but you must first go through the described procedure. You can also save freezing right there.
Frozen olives change their taste and appearance
In addition, olives - whether fresh or pickled - are among the foods whose taste and appearance suffers from freezing. The fruits lose a lot of juice and bite, instead they become mushy and tough. The taste also gets an unpleasant rancid note. Olives are very oil-rich fruits - which is why they are also called "oil fruits" - and like any oil, olive oil becomes rancid and flaky by the cold. More specifically, freezing itself is not the problem, it's thawing. Thawing oil - and thus the oil in oil-rich fruits - decomposes very quickly into its components and thus loses its aroma.
How can you preserve olives?
Instead, olives can be preserved by inserting them for up to 24 months. After debittering the fruits are placed in brine and preserved. The preserved fruits may either remain in the brine or be placed in an airtight container and filled with a good vegetable oil, such as olive oil or sunflower oil, so that they are completely covered with it.
Types of preservation of olives
Tips & Tricks
Make sure that your pickled olives (as well as any olive oil) get as little or no sunlight as possible. This leads to an oxidation that affects the fruits in taste and appearance, but also reduces the shelf life.