03/08
The Olive Journey: From Grove to Plate
Olives are one of the most important ingredients in Mediterranean cuisine. They’re pressed into the olive oil, used as a garnish, and showcased all on their own as well. This mighty ingredient is packed with flavor and nutritional power, but it didn’t get that way all on its own. Here’s how your olive gets to you from grove to plate.
The Harvest
A quality harvest starts with a quality tree. Olives are grown on olive trees. Olive trees are tropical, and require warm temperatures, dry temperatures, and cool but not cold winters. This means olive trees can’t be grown just anywhere.
Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco and Greece are currently the top producers in olives, in part because their climate is perfect for the Olive tree.
It takes about three years for a new olive tree to bear fruit. Some cultivars can take as long as 12 years though! Once the olive tree is ready to produce, it’s time to harvest.
Even in commercial olive orchards, olive picking is largely done by hand. Harvestors may use some machinery, such as a vibrating tong to shake the olives off the tree, but plenty of handwork is still done.
Curing the Olives
One the olives are picked, they have to be cured before they are ready for the next step in the process. Olives straight off the tree are very bitter. They’re not something you’d really want to eat. One method of doing this is to soak them in a brine. This leeches out the bitter flavor so just the deliciousness of the olive is left behind.
Olive oil is made from fresh olives, and you can still taste that with the note of bitterness in the oil. If olive oil doesn’t have any bitterness, chances are it’s not fresh anymore.
Shipping
Once the olives have been processed, either by pressing them into oil or brining to remove bitterness, they can be bottled, canned or jarred into their final home. Once they are preserved, they are ready to be shipped around the world to the restaurant or grocery store.
Olives often need to travel quite far to get to places that don’t have olive trees, but luckily preparations such as canning, jarring and being made into oil allow olives to be shipped easily.
Olive Appreciation
It takes a lot of work to prepare olives. Waiting for the tree to grow, handpicking the resulting olives, pressing them into olive oil. Without the help of people who grow these olives, we could never appreciate them elsewhere in the world.
Luckily, olive growers are passionate about their work, and about the delicious fruit of the olive tree. Thanks to their hardwork, we can enjoy olives all over the world.
The next time you bite into an olive cured in oil, or enjoy a dip made with an olive oil base, think about the olive tree it came from. Your delicious meal started out on a tree, growing in the gentle breeze of a Mediterranean field, and had a long journey to get to your plate.