In five years, the SanGiorgio family will be completely legitimate

Like all true Italians, my lifelong dream is to get into the olive import/export business. Oh sure, I may have toyed around with the idea of growing artichokes, or avocados, or maybe even basil, but deep down, my heart has always been set on a field of olive trees, producing all the oil and fruit I could possibly desire. One might think that living in a small apartment, as I currently do here in Switzerland, might preclude me from living my dream. But, as the French say: au contraire, mon ami!

As mentioned previously on this blog, my colleague and friend, Serge Reymond, is the part-owner of a reasonably-sized country home in France. In addition to wonderfully scenic and terrifying surroundings, he also has a fair number of fruit trees in his backyard; amongst quince, fig, and citrus are a half-dozen small olive trees. When I mentioned to him my great desire to cure and marinate my own olives, he offered me the use of his entire olive harvest this year.

Fig. 1: In ancient Greece, cutting down an olive tree was punishable by death or exile. Those were the good old days.

As it was not quite harvesting time when I visited the trees and it had not exactly been a bumper year for olives, the inaugural harvest was somewhat lackluster. Still, it's better to start small and work your way up. Of course, in addition to being few in number, the olives were also quite small in size. This is something I should have thought about more when it came time to cure.

Fig. 2: The entirety of this year's "Sangiorgiolive" crop. I didn't feel too bad about smuggling it into Switzerland, although I'm sure I violated all sorts of importation laws.

When curing olives, there are many options available, nearly all of them impossible for the casual curer. Most involve caustic chemicals (lye and other nasty stuff) and weeks of intense care. Further limiting my options was the fact that at the time of harvest, I lived in an apartment the size of a shoebox with only the barest kitchen facilities and no storage space to speak of. Fortunately, a brief internet search produced a hopeful possibility: salt curing! If you've ever been to a fancy grocery store with an olive bar (or, pretty much any grocery story in the bay area) you'll notice that usually one variety of olives will look noticeably different from the rest: wrinkly, dark, and not swimming in oil. These olives have been cured by being packed in salt for weeks or even months, and only just before shipment are they re-hydrated with a soak in oil. A timeless article from the January, 1976 issue of Mother Earth News lays out the details. Basically, pack the olives in salt; change the salt every couple weeks; and enjoy!

Fig. 3: Step one, pack in salt -- completed!

All of that was done back at the end of September. Roughly every two or three weeks, I would take the olives out of their jar, throw out the salt, and start again with new salt. After just the first batch of salt, it was somewhat clear that this would be a disappointing experiment: the olives were so small that they were basically "wrinkling" all the way to the pit. Salt curing probably calls for a fairly large olive so that an inner, moist core survives the curing -- these were clearly not ideal candidates. Nonetheless, I had not come this far for nothing so a taste test was inevitable. As the french say, c'est en forgeant que l'on devient forgeron.

Fig. 4: The "finished" olives.

Fortunately for me, I had a couple of taste-testing volunteers at my disposal as Chris and Dan happened to be visiting a couple weeks ago. The olives had been largely forgotten at that point, but upon rifling through my cupboards for things to eat, we came across the neglected jar of salt and olives. Ever ready to advance the frontiers of science, Chris, Dan and I each tried an olive. Chris described the taste as, "not awful." I would describe it as, "olivey chalk." Dan didn't have much to say. Although there were still half a dozen more olives to be tasted, we felt as though we had exhausted the range of tasting possibilities offered by them and decided to wait until next year's crop. This was a wise move, since next year I will have significant advantages, including: one year's worth of olive curing experience; a better idea of when to harvest olives; a large basement perfect for olive curing; and full knowledge of one way not to cure olives. It should be a piece of cake.

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As noted, Dan visited for a weekend and Chris was here for nearly two weeks. Even though Dan's weekend trip to Switzerland was fun for everyone, I don't have a lot of pictures. Basically, it was bitterly cold (it snowed that Saturday) and not a lot of fun to go outside. Also, Dan had an awesome camera (the Canon D40!) so he did a lot more picture taking than me or Chris. Here is the only picture I found that I thought was worth sharing. This is from our trip down to the lakeside town of Ouchy; people had obviously heard we were coming.

Fig. 5: Swiss grafitti artists are like philosophers, or something. Truer words are rarely spoken.