Raw olives

In a "seemed like a good idea at the time" category, I bought a pound of raw olives at Caputo's. They are uncooked, uncured, bitter as all get out, varying in color from all green to all black.
Quick research talked about lye and months, limiting my desire to cure them.
Any suggestions on how they can be used?

MLS wrote:In a "seemed like a good idea at the time" category, I bought a pound of raw olives at Caputo's. They are uncooked, uncured, bitter as all get out, varying in color from all green to all black.
Quick research talked about lye and months, limiting my desire to cure them.
Any suggestions on how they can be used?

I would jar them up in some old brine and give them to someone you don't like.

Flip

My enologists group on Yahoo! just rang all the changes on this topic. The upshot is that there's lots of ways to do it. When I was a kid in CA, a guy on my paper route used to cure his own and they were the best damn olives I've ever had in my life.

And yes, one traditional method of cure in fact uses lye, but the soak period can be as short as 24 hours.

Here's a decent site:

http://lolivier-sonoma.com/mediacenter/1112.htm

If you wander around the Jean-Talon mkt in Montreal this time of year you can see just zillions of the flat crates of fresh olives stacked in the various stalls. Makes me think that it *must* be a worthwhile practice...

Geo

Hi,

On another board there is a discussion on curing olives. They also suggest a booklet you can obtain on the subject from the University of California at Davis, which seems like a very good recommendation.

Regards,

Don't know if its just a wives tale or not, but I was at a olive orchard in Israel, and they mentioned that raw olives are toxic, so, ahm, eating them raw is a bad idea. Okay. Baibai.