Craig Perry, age 7, of La Jolla, California, for his question:
How do they make olives taste good?
Olives gathered from the tree have a nasty bitter flavor, even when they are fully ripe. If you taste one, you will make a face and want to spit out the pieces. This, it so happens, is a very good idea. That nasty taste is made by a powerful chemical a chemical that can be very unfriendly if it gets down inside a human tummy. So spit out every last drop of that bitter taste and then rinse your mouth with cold water to make sure. Of course, an even better idea is not to taste a fresh picked olive in the first place. Maybe next time.
Nobody knows who first discovered that olives are good to eat. For a long time, no doubt our ancestors tasted them, spit out the bitter taste and decided to leave them alone. Then someone discovered that when olives are soaked in lye and salty brine, their bitterness changes to a rich, savory flavor. This happened ages ago, in some Mediterranean country where silvery, grey green olive trees love to grow. However, the discovery that made olives edible was very risky. Most likely the salty lye mixtures poisoned more people than the bitter olives did.
When it comes to treating olives at home, this is still a very risky problem. The bitter taste comes from a burning acid chemical. The lye is a burning alkali chemical ¬and even stronger than the acid. In the world of chemicals, when acids and alkalis meet they get busy at once and try to change each other. When the two teams are even, the newly formed chemicals are neutral. This means they are neither acid nor alkali.
This chemical trick is used to make olives taste good. They are soaked in crocks or barrels of water with dissolved lye and well rinsed in baths of salty brine. The lye mixture is dangerous to handle and even a drop burns the skin. The olives must stay dunked in it until the alkali chemical seeps through the olive meat to the hard pits in the center. They soak there for a whole day. Then they are rinsed in clean water and given a fresh bath of lye the next day. It may take three days of soaking to get rid of the bitter taste. After every soak, the batch must be tested by an expert. It is risky to taste a sample because of the burning lye. What’s more, batches of olives often go bad, even when an expert is doing the job.
When the olives have soaked up enough lye to change their bitter acids, they must be taken out at once. They are rinsed and rinsed again and left to soak in clean water about a week. The water is changed four times every day. Then a new bath is prepared for them. This time salt is dissolved in the water. After about four days of dunking, the olives should be safe to eat and taste just the way they should. There are other recipes for making olives taste good. Some of them are faster, but all are risky ¬unless you are a top notch expert.
Most of the olives we use are grown in California. This all started way back in 1769 just about 200 years ago. A Franciscan priest from Spain came to the lovely new mission at San Diego. And he brought with him olives, the first olive trees that took root in America. Now the fruitful olive trees of California cover 32,000 acres. And their yearly harvest gives us 44,000 tons of bitter olives all needing a lot of tricky treatment to make them taste good.