So you can’t process artificially ripened olives in jars – the glass wouldn’t
withstand the cooking temperature.
Could you please explain this in more detail? Glass bottles are commonly used for
home canning and I can’t imagine that temperatures that would damage a glass
container would be have a positive effect on the palatability of olives.
m sort of bemused, these black kalamata olives are in glass … I have seen several different brands of kalamatas in glass, just these were the first that popped up on google images.
Around here, they sell all kinds of black and green olives in sealed plastic bags. I guess, modern processing steps are well able to perform the necessary high-temperature processing step before the packaging step.
I don’t equate canned olives with green olives as a comestible. Canned olives are limp and lack most of the flavor otherwise found in green olives sold in jars. (I’ve always thought they were developed to as a cheap way to put olives on pizza.)
Also, according to this staff report, it seems like California was the place to make olives commercially popular as a thing to eat alone as a snack. Nevertheless, olives are a seemingly indispensable component of just about any hors d’oeuvres tray in every Armenian, Greek or Middle Eastern restaurant I’ve been to. So did those cuisines pick up the habit of eating olives like that from California? Or was it simply that California made it a good business? (I know that a lot of the early farmers in the San Juanquin were from Armenia, and the Imperial had many Middle Easterners.)
Tangent: I want to congratulate Eutychus on returning to Staff Reports with one that is amusing as well as informative, and to express the hope that he’ll do more!
Well, mrAru is from Fresno CA, and there are an amazing number of Armenians and Turks living there [which apparently made for some very interesting times back in the day. Serious drive bys beating the dead horse of the Armenian holocost. It has calmed down a lot to be replaced by the hmong / vietnamese and whoever drive bys. His sister used to work with one of the gang task forces.]
I went to a fantastic armenian wedding reception for mrAru’s sister, the food was amazing. There was an amazing ground almond cake that was about as rich and dense as plutonium … I would love to get the recipe for it. It was better than baklava!
I’ve had brined olives oils drenched in olive oil or something similiar in enough different places in the middle east and the Mediterranean to think the practice of pickling olives started there. People cultivated olives for a long time before there was a California.
As the report says, though, olives were originally cultivated in order to produce oil (not snacks). The Spanish brought olives to California in the 18th century (which we can assume was long before you (signal11) ate olives in the Middle East), and they ate them on the dinner table only as an afterthought. They pursued the cultivation of olives for very real, practical needs: heating and lighting (in addition to holy oil, as they were missionaries, and technically working for the Church coming out of Mexico city).
My question is whether commercial cultivation (that is, a profitable industry drawing upon this new form of ripening) of olives in California–specifically as snacks–might have increased the popularity of olives as snacks in Europe. I’m wondering about the possibility of culinary cultural “back-formation,” similar to the way in which a lot of what people (in the northern and eastern part of the U.S.) think of as “Mexican” food actually gained its popularity in the U.S., or close to it, and then found its way back to Mexico. Consider the story of “nachos”:
I understand what you’re saying but the cultivation and the preservation of olives as a food item has been around for a very long time.
The staff report is regarding the production of canned, black olives.
There are so many different ways of brining olives in different parts of the mediterranean that it’s a pretty far stretch to think this is a backflow type of thing.
I think there’s references to eating cheese with olives in classical Roman and Greek literature. Modern Greeks have a very nice way of doing black olives dry and chewy. As the link to Don Carlos shows, they’d be picked ripe. I don’t know why California can’t do that but maybe it’s just that waiting for them to ripen wouldn’t manage demand.
Olive trees live a long time - in fact it takes years for them to become productive - so if you have a grove, you are stuck with it. Until recently, demand for oil away from the Mediterranean was low and tasteless rape oil has been encouraged where cooking oil started to replace fat 40-30 years ago (sometimes Soy). Olive oil particularly does not work for Chinese-style high temperature stir-frying.
Therefore traditional groves have probably had plenty of spare olives to ripen on the tree and meet the relatively low demand for them. They are far too overpowering to be a major ingredient of anything (though a minor one in a lot of rich sauces). Given that populations and demand have risen over time, they must have always been used as food.
Probably there was much more demand for oil in the remote past when it was used for lighting and any kind of massage you care to name. They might have found more uses for the fruit as that declined.
The assertion “So you can’t process artificially ripened olives in jars – the glass wouldn’t withstand the cooking temperature.” is incorrect, and in fact is not mentioned in Ms. Fusano’s quote.
Glass containers are used in commercial retort-based thermal processing (“canning”) all the time. The glass containers are more delicate, requiring different process times so as not to create thermal shock in the glass, but store shelves are full of jars of heat-treated products from salsa to fruit.
What Ms. Fusano didn’t mention (and Eutychus forgot to ask) is if there might be other reasons that glass containers weren’t used. The two at the top of the list are:
Appearance. The unripe, green olives are firm and not given to shedding material into the packing brine, whereas the black, processed olives are kept in a brine that is somewhat cloudy from the lye-processed olive flesh (yes, that’s the term), giving the product a terrible shelf presence. The lye processing essentially predigests the olives, making them soft and prone to losing material. The next time you open a can of black olives, put them in a wine glass to see what I mean.
2.) Cost. Cans are cheaper, faster to process (as above), don’t easily break during transit, and a label with some cheerily photographed olives on the label look much better than the dingy contents.