Recipes

Olives, Dry Salt-Cured

The wrinkled black olive -- Moroccan, Nyons, the ones that look like raisins and taste concentrated enough to use as a seasoning. No brine at all: the olives are buried in salt and the salt draws the water out of them. The diagnostic detail, and the one that decides whether this works: **only small, fully ripe, dark red to black fruit.** A green olive dry salted gives you a bitter pebble.

Pickled · Vegetable · Mediterranean · Moroccan · Snack

Olives, Dry Salt-Cured
Prep 30 minutes
Cook 5 to 6 weeks
Serves 2 lb
Level Easy

The wrinkled black olive — Moroccan, Nyons, the ones that look like raisins and taste concentrated enough to use as a seasoning. No brine at all: the olives are buried in salt and the salt draws the water out of them. The diagnostic detail, and the one that decides whether this works: only small, fully ripe, dark red to black fruit. A green olive dry salted gives you a bitter pebble.

Ingredients

THE OLIVES

  • 2 lb small, fully ripe olives, dark red to black (oil-rich varieties such as Mission are usual)
  • 1 lb pickling salt (about 1 1/2 cups), plus more for the top layer

FOR STORING

  • 1 lb salt per 10 lb of cured olives

TO EAT OUT OF HAND

  • Olive oil, and dried rosemary, oregano or thyme to rub

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Olive Oil

  1. Step 1 - Use the right fruit, or do not start. Small, fully ripe, dark red to black. Larger fruit softens too much under salt, and unripe fruit never loses its bitterness this way. Oil-rich varieties like Mission are the usual choice. This is the least forgiving of the cures about what goes in.
  2. Step 2 - Mix thoroughly with salt at 1 lb per 2 lb of olives. Not layered — mixed, so every olive is in contact with salt on all sides. Use a container that drains, or one you are willing to pour liquid off.
  3. Step 3 - Put a 1-inch layer of salt on top and cover with cheesecloth. The top layer protects the surface fruit; the cloth keeps insects out and lets moisture leave.
  4. Step 4 - Hold at 60-80 °F and remix once a week. Every week for a month, turn the whole thing over so the fruit from the bottom comes up. Liquid will pool — that is the olives’ own water coming out, and it should go.
  5. Step 5 - Five to six weeks total. Done when they are wrinkled, dark, dense and no longer aggressively bitter. Taste one from the middle, not the top. These stay salty and slightly bitter, because dry salting removes less oleuropein than the wet methods.
  6. Step 6 - Sift, dry, and pack. Shake the cured olives free of salt, spread them out to dry overnight, then pack with fresh salt at 1 lb per 10 lb of olives.
  7. Step 7 - To eat them out of hand, dip briefly in boiling water, air dry, then rub with olive oil and rosemary. This is the “oil-cured” olive you buy — note the oil is a finish, not the cure. Nothing was cured in oil.
  8. Keeps: 1 month at cool room temperature, 6 months refrigerated, 1 year frozen. ⭐ And this is the one cure you can freeze straight — the lye-cured styles have to be boiled in light brine first, but dry salt-cured olives need no pre-treatment at all, because there is so little water left in them to make ice.

Notes

Where the numbers come from. Olives: Safe Methods for Home Pickling, UC ANR Publication 8267 (Yada and Harris, UC Davis, 2007), read in full. An earlier version of this recipe was built from a county extension digest of that publication and has been corrected against the original.

⭐ This is the oldest technique in the section, and it is barely a technique. Columella describes essentially this in the first century AD — black olives drained under salt for about thirty days, then rinsed and jarred. Two thousand years later the only thing that has changed is that we can say why: osmosis pulls the water out and carries the oleuropein with it, and what is left is too dry and too salty for anything to grow in.

⭐ “Oil-cured” is a misnomer worth knowing. Moroccan Beldi and the wrinkled black olives sold as “oil-cured” were cured in salt. The oil goes on at the end, for gloss and to keep them from drying to leather. Nobody debitters an olive in oil, and an olive sitting in oil with no acid and no salt behind it is a genuinely dangerous jar — the under-oil page in the Pickled section has the body count.

⚠ Do not scale the salt down. The ratio is not seasoning, it is the mechanism. Half the salt gives you fermenting, softening fruit rather than a dry cure.

Cultivars: ripe black Mission, Beldi (Morocco), Tanche (Nyons AOC), Throumba from Thassos. Throumba is the strange one — it debitters on the tree, by a fungus, before you ever put salt near it. That story is on the varieties page.

Related: Olives, Water-Cured (Green) and Olives, Brine-Cured Greek Style are the wet cures; this is the dry one.