Moon over Martinborough

The day after our big olive harvest with the city friends, the weather took a turn for the worse. It didn’t matter. Four of us in the harvest gang were determined to hand pick some olives for pickling and preserving. We weren’t about to be put off by the weather.

Olives and macrocarpas in the mist

Everyone that morning was sore from the day before. Inside the fire was going, and outside the temperature had plummeted. The mist across the hills had thickened. But we four intrepid olive harvesters put on winter coats and gloves, left behind the others who were reading by the fire, and headed down into the grove with a couple old plastic buckets.

It doesn’t snow in the Wairarapa valley, except for occasionally up in the mountains, and the coldest days in Martinborough are nothing compared to the serious, snow-filled winters of my native Michigan. But my body seems to have changed.

Perhaps the relatively mild climate of New Zealand has made my blood thinner over the past six years. When the winter days do come here – days which would make most Michiganders laugh and say, “You call this winter?” – I am chilled to the bone. This place has made me soft.

In the grove

We walked along through the rows and rows of trees until we came to a row of Manzanillo. “These are the ones for pickling,” I said, and we gathered around our first tree.

Olives for pickling have to be harvested by hand so they don’t get bruised or damaged in the process. I suppose some big commercial growers overseas must do it with machines, but not here. The quality of eating olives depends on the care they get from tree to table, and we just want good olives.

The city friends and I quickly realized how hard it was to hand pick with gloves on, so the gloves came off. Each person picked only the best olives, careful to avoid the ones that the birds or the frost had tampered with.

It was quiet. We talked about the trees, the olives, each other. The mist surrounded us. Our conversation was dotted with the pleasant and rhythmic sound of fat, round olives hitting the inside of plastic buckets.

When we’d harvested one tree, we moved to the next. There was no hurry. We had no particular quantity of olives in mind. We just wanted enough for all four of us to have fun with some pickling. The silvery-green leaves were wet, and our hands grew cold very quickly.

Finishing up

After about an hour we decided we’d had enough. By then our hands had become red and stiff, and picking tiny olives with unbending fingers is difficult. We put our gloves back on and wandered up to the house.

The city friends who’d had the good sense to stay inside also had the good sense to prepare us lunch.

We ate beautiful, steaming hot, homemade pumpkin soup which one of the city friends had made for the weekend. Another city friend had run into the village and brought back loaves of fresh bread. Because I have Celiac Disease and can’t eat gluten, for me they sliced up some of the fresh gluten free bread I’d baked for the weekend – full of delicious corn meal and amaranth flour.

Bare apricot trees at the edge of the grove

The following day, before everyone left to drive back over the Rimutaka Hill and into the city, we divvied up the Manzanillo olives among the four of us who wanted them (and who’d made the commitment to pick them in the cold).

I made quick photocopies of the pickling recipe a friend of a friend had given us. All the picklers headed off carrying a plastic grocery bag full of olives and a small white piece of paper with the recipe.

Tasting fresh olives

Years ago, my old friend Booga back in Michigan told me a story about her first trip to Greece. She and a friend rented bicycles and were riding through the Greek countryside when they came across an olive grove.

They got off their bicycles and ran over to the grove, yelling “Olives! Olives!” Being from Michigan, they’d never actually witnessed olives growing on trees.

They decided they were going to experience fresh olives for the first time. They each picked an olive and popped it directly into their mouths.

What they experienced then was the most bitter, foul taste they’d ever known. They shrieked and spat the olives out on the ground immediately.

Booga and her friend didn’t know about oleuropein, the phenolic compound that makes fresh olives bitter. Neither did I until I landed in an olive grove. The only way to get rid of the bitterness is through pickling, preserving, or curing the olives in some way.

I have no idea how the first person discovered that olives, which actually taste terrible raw, could make such delicious fruit when pickled and such delicious oil when pressed (the oleouropein doesn’t get transferred to the oil). It’s one of the world’s mysteries.

Noah’s olives

After all the city friends’ cars had pulled away after the harvest weekend, Rick and I strolled back into the house. I pulled out the black plastic bin Rick had bought earlier that day. I took it outside and cleaned it in the same vigorous way I’d cleaned our olive oil containers before the harvest.

Then I washed the olives carefully, put them in the bin, and filled it up with enough water to cover the olives. To my surprise, the olives floated.

I have never before pickled my own olives. For our first harvest, two years ago, it was all I could do to organize pressing the olives for oil. Last year we didn’t harvest. So this year I’m picking for the first time.

The recipe we have calls for soaking the olives for forty days, changing the water every two days. It doesn’t call for saltwater. Plain old tap water will do.

I like the length of time it requires. I imagine Noah in the flood, a cask of olives waterlogged on deck for his forty days and forty nights. Maybe that’s how someone discovered olive pickling?

The ritual of changing the water

There is a kind of zen-like, meditative discipline to changing the water on your olives every other day for forty days. It’s as though you’re measuring time.

Pickling olives at day 26

Rick marked the water changing days on the big wall calendar in our tiny office, and he also wrote in the other steps on the days we need to do them – packing the olives in rock salt, placing them in jars with lemon, garlic and thyme.

I change the water in the evenings, just before I go to bed. This is my new ritual, like feeding the chickens in the morning.

Every second evening, I get the large plastic bin from the empty guest room where it lives and bring it into the kitchen. I unclasp the black handles that hold down the lid, then set the lid on the counter. I lift the bin to the sink and – slowly, so the olives don’t tumble and get bruised – pour out the contents into a large colander. Then I fill up the bin with water and pour the olives back in. The water breaks their fall.

I never know what I’ll find when I open that lid. After just a few days the olives already smelled so fresh, fruity and, well, olivey that I was tempted to eat them there and then. Around day 10 they began leaving bubbles at the top of the water, but by day 16 the bubbles had stopped.

We’re on day 26 now. Gradually the olives have begun to sink to the bottom of the bin, and the colors have changed. We’re pickling a mix of black and green olives together. Over time the dark ones have turned a lighter shade of black while the bright green ones have turned a darker shade of green. It’s as though their colors are spilling into each other.

When I’m done changing the water I put the bin back in the guest room. I’m one person in a long line, doing something that people have done for centuries.

Finally I shut off the lights, turn the damper down on the fire, and climb into bed next to Rick – the beautiful smell of olives still lingering in my head.

Recipe for Noah’s olives

• Put olives in a bucket of water. Leave for 40 days, changing the water every 2 days.
• After 40 days, drain olives and cover with rock salt. Leave for 2 days.
• Wash olives well in cold water and pack them into clean, sterilised jars with lemon, garlic and thyme. Cover with oil or vinegar or half oil, half vinegar. Seal and leave for 2 weeks before eating.
• These olives will keep for at least 6 months.

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Read the next post: Chicken blood on my boot

Read about how these olives turned out: Noah’s olives go in the jars

See other posts on olives and olive oil.

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