How We Harvested, Cured & Preserved Olives from the Trees on our Portuguese Homestead

We are fortunate enough to have some mature olive trees on our homestead. Yes, they have been neglected for a few years, but as our first Winter approached on the farm, the trees were teeming with juicy olives begging to be picked. From observing the locals, it was clear that November certainly was the time for olive harvesting.

In Portugal there are community style olive presses (lagar in Portuguese), and the lagar in our local town was always full of local farmers waiting for their olives to be pressed into beautiful olive oil. Of course, we were intrigued by this and desperately wanted in on the action. This year, we didn’t quite have enough olives for pressing at the lagar and agreed that hopefully we could press our own oil after next year’s harvest, after the trees receive a little TLC. The olives provided by the trees on our farm during our first Winter in Portugal were an added extra and we didn’t want them to go to waste as they started to fall from the trees. If we could manage to cure some homegrown olives to eat that would be fantastic!

We set about picking the olives, granted not using the most efficient method but we had no special tools or equipment so just used what we had – our hands and a ladder! We were quite picky when harvesting them, avoiding any damaged ones or those that the little critters had sampled.

We managed to collect a total of 5kg of olives, which we were pretty impressed with!

We sorted through them, separating them by colour. The green ones are less mature than the black ones and will take a while longer to cure. We had about a 50/50 colour split from the trees in different locations. Next, we washed all the olives before placing them into a few containers. We just used old ice cream tubs.

We made up a brine, using a ratio of 1 part salt to 10 parts water, using scales to weigh the salt and firmly mixing with the water to form a solution. We covered the olives in the containers completely with the brine and loosely placed lids on them. We decided to store them in the adega beneath our house.

We then waited… We checked on the olives and changed the saltwater once a week. We had read that the black olives would take less time to cure and for us this was the case. After about 2 months the black olives passed the taste test and no longer tasted bitter, so it was time to jar them. The green olives took longer and after nearly 5 months, which felt like an eternity, they were also ready to be jarred.

Jarring the olives was quite a simple process really. We used a vinegar, salt and water brine, and also tried adding some herbs and flavourings in a couple of jars. To make the brine, we combined 2 parts sea salt, 5 parts vinegar (we used apple cider vinegar for the black olives and white wine vinegar for the green ones) and 20 parts water. We made sure all the olives were completely covered in the jars and added a glug of olive oil to the top of each before securing the lids.

We played around with adding some flavourings from the garden. We had one jar with chilli and garlic, and another with lemon and sage. The flavours infuse very well with the olives!

Our first go at curing olives was a great success. We store our jars of olives in the fridge and often enjoy them as an evening snack. They also would make a lovely gift!