Olives, Water-Cured (Green)

The one to start with, and the only olive cure that asks nothing of you but patience — no lye, no chemistry, no way to hurt yourself. You crack each olive with a mallet, change the water for a week, and finish in salt and white wine vinegar. The diagnostic detail: water curing removes less oleuropein than any other method, so these stay faintly bitter on purpose. That is the flavour, not a failure to finish.

Ingredients

THE OLIVES

• 10 lb green-ripe olives, any variety (Sevillano, Manzanillo and Mission are the forgiving ones)
• Water to cover, changed daily

FINISH BRINE (for about 10 lb of olives)

• 1 gallon cool water
• 1 lb pickling salt (1 1/2 cups)
• 2 cups white wine vinegar

OPTIONAL, FOR THE JARS

• Chopped oregano, lemon slices, garlic cloves, dried chili

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Olive Oil

1. Step 1 - Sort by size before you do anything else. Grade the fruit and cure each grade separately. Mixed sizes leach at different rates, so one batch finishes as bitter big ones and blown-out small ones. This is the step everybody skips and the one that decides the batch. Discard anything bruised.
2. Step 2 - Crack every olive with a mallet. One or two at a time on a board, struck with the flat of a mallet or a rolling pin. Crush just enough to split the flesh — do not break the pits and do not remove them. This is the whole mechanism: water can only pull oleuropein out through a broken surface.
3. Step 3 - Cover with cool water and weight them down. A heavy plate or a sealed bag of water on top, lid loose. Any olive that floats oxidises, darkens and goes soft.
4. Step 4 - Change the water daily for 6 to 7 days. Drain, rinse, refill, at the same time each day so you do not lose count.
5. Step 5 - Taste, and go longer if you want them milder. A few more days of daily changes will take more of the bitterness out. It will never take all of it — this method leaves the least-changed olive of the four, which is the point of it.
6. Step 6 - Make the finish brine. 1 lb (1 1/2 cups) pickling salt in 1 gallon of cool water, then 2 cups of white wine vinegar. Enough for about 10 lb of fruit.
7. Step 7 - Pack, season, refrigerate. Drain, cover completely with the brine, and add oregano, lemon and garlic if you like. Close the lid firmly. 🔴 These must be kept refrigerated. They are ready after 4 days and better after a few weeks.
8. Keeps up to a year in the refrigerator, in the finish brine.

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.

⚠ What changed, and why you may have seen different numbers from me. An earlier version of this recipe carried “at least a week, and more like a month” for the soak. That came from a county digest that had merged two different UC recipes. The primary is specific: this style is 6 to 7 days, and the month-long schedule belongs to Olives, Water-Cured, Kalamata Style, which uses ripe black fruit, knife cuts, red wine vinegar and an oil cap instead. Both are real. The mixture was not.

⭐ Why this one stays slightly bitter, and why that is the point. UC notes plainly that water curing takes out less oleuropein than the other methods. Lye hydrolyses the compound outright; water can only carry away what dissolves. So the water-cured olive is the one that still tastes like the fruit it came from. If you want the mild, uniform, faintly hollow olive out of a can, this is the wrong recipe and Olives, Lye-Cured (Reference) is the honest one.

⭐ And the history is on this side. This is close to the oldest way anybody made an olive edible — water and salt, four thousand years before anyone leached an ash. The full account is on the “How They Became Edible” page in the Pickled section.

Cultivars: any green-ripe variety works. Sevillano, Manzanillo and Mission are what California growers actually ship for home curing. ⚠ Ascolano and Barouni are named by UC as prone to softening — avoid them for a first batch.

Related: Olives, Sicilian Style in Brine is what happens if you ferment green olives instead of leaching them, and Olives, Marinated with Lemon and Garlic is what to do with any of it afterwards.