I’ve been learning all about picking and processing olives in Portugal.
This has to be one of my favorite moments in the Portuguese year, along with the cork cutting and sardine festival. It’s wonderful to see the olives growing black and shiny on the trees, and then to see everyone out picking for days on end. The olives here are magnificent and a big part of life for the village. The olive groves around the village are ancient and still producing a huge amount of fruit. Now is the time of year to be picking and processing the olives in our part of Portugal.
The olives are taken to the local press and turned into olive oil, or processed and jarred. They are eaten at almost every meal; dressed with oil, lemon juice, garlic and oregano.
Picking and processing the olives to eat is a long process but very worth it. We have two young olive trees on our land but only one that produced olives this year, and they were beauties! Picking is either a joy or a trial; when the olives are as large and bountiful as ours were this year it’s delightful to strip the branches and gather loads of the glorious fruit in next to no time. However, when the crop is bad with few small fruit on the trees, it’s more like a frustrating game of hide and seek.
How we process our olives
Once we had our buckets of olives we followed the local method for processing olives; cutting and then curing in brine. We used an olive cutter fitted into the top of a large water bottle to cut our olives – there are 3 ways locally to cure; smashed olives, cut olives and uncut olives and each take a different length of time so we chose to cut ours. Inside the cutter there are blades so as you push the olive through they are sliced along the side, easy but time consuming! As we went through the olives we discarded any with holes or serious blemishes, which might mean an uninvited guest lurking inside…
Then we added salt and water and turned them every day, changing the water a couple of times a week for around 4-6 weeks before letting them sit for a bit then putting them in jars with more brine. Upon advice from a number of locals I only use natural water for the curing process, nothing out of the tap, which means a couple of trips a week up and down our hill to the fonte with water bottles. I’m just glad it’s so close!
All that is left is to wait for a few months and pop open a jar. Then rinse them well, dress them with care and attention and enjoy them with a glass of Alentejo red!
