Wow you guys! I guess I didn’t word it exactly like I should have. I’ll bow to DrLizardo and hope I can reword my question to what is above. The vast majority of black olives at my grocery store are in cans, green ones in jars. If you don’t want to segregate them by color, then why are some in cans, while thers are in jars.
I think the dark brine in jars thing makes sense, who’d want to see that. Maybe I’ll check that olive website again.
I have noticed that almost all green olives in jars are
imported. Most co-ops (companies than actually process
olives) in the US use cans for everything.
I have seen a few smaller companies in the US use jars
for olives. But they use jars for all the types and they
only (currently) process green olives.
So, if a company is set up for cans, they use cans. If they
are set up for jars they use jars. Marketing being what it is,
the big US producers are winning shelf space for cans, and the
import makers are winning shelf space for green olives in jars.
The smaller US producers are going with green olives because
it is a simplier process that allows a variety of specialities.
(Like using garlic flavor.)
BTW the reason olives are black, is they change color in the
process. Olives are picked green. Those used for olive oil
can be picked when dark.
The dark (actually purple) olives on a tree are basically sun burned. They cannot be used for tasty eating.
You do not find much US olive oil in the supermarket. Even the
major US producer (on the east coast, can’t remember the name)
imports the oil and bottles it.
AWB answered the same question in this thread with:
Trader Joe’s has Kalamata olives in both cans and jars.
Muffaletta comes in a jar.
And, uh, that’s it.
According to Raymond Sokolov of Natural History, Ninety-eight percent of world olive acreage is in Mediterranean countries. Among them, Spain, Italy and Greece produce more than half of the planet’s olive tonnage, almost all of it in the form of oil. But these countries, as well as France, North Africa, the Levant and even Chile do sell roughly a tenth of their olive crops as table olives, ranging from tiny shriveled salt-cured blacks to mushy salty reds to fermented greens. In the United States California is virtually the only state that grows olives at all.
That said, California does not compete in the olive world except in one subspecialty…the black-ripe olive. The black-ripe is neither naturally ripe nor black.
The California process is usually said to have been invented by Freda Ehmann of Oroville, or possibly C. M. Gifford of San Diego or Emily Robertson of Auburn. In any case these folks were looking for a process to turn green olives black and allow them to be canned for long storage. Along the way this resulted in the Lindsay Ripe Olive Company which is a growers cooperative established in 1916.
Here’s the process: whole green olives go into tanks containing water and lye (sodium hydroxide). Lye leaches out the bitter glucoside called oleuropein. The secret to blackening is air; air bubbled through the curing tank oxidizes and blackens the olive.
The black-ripe is known technically as a low-acid fruit.
Low-acid fruit has to be meticulously heated after canning because the airless medium in the can is a perfect environment for anaerobic bacteria.
Wait a minute. This is too much information, isn’t it?
I propose that most North Americans are used to black canned olives because the North American industry was founded on a)black olives that are b) canned for long storage.
Other civilizations did not put up those requirements.
Next.