Dry-Salt Cured Olives: The Wrinkled Kind
Those intense, wrinkled, almost meaty black olives — the kind that come dressed in oil and herbs — aren’t dried. They’re dry-salt cured, the simplest method of all, and the most concentrated.
How it works
Take fully ripe black olives and pack them in coarse salt, layer on layer, in a perforated container so liquid can drain. Over a few weeks the salt draws out moisture and bitterness together, shrivelling the fruit into a wrinkled, glossy, intensely flavoured olive. Stir or re-layer occasionally; the olives weep dark juice as they cure. Then rinse off the surface salt.
The taste, and the styles
The result is deep, slightly bitter and richly olive-y — far more concentrated than a brined olive, because nothing dilutes it. This is the method behind Moroccan ‘oil-cured’ olives and Greek Throuba styles. Finish them in olive oil with garlic, citrus zest, chilli or thyme and they keep for weeks.
Dry-salting suits small, fleshy, fully ripe black olives best; big watery ones don’t shrink as gracefully. It’s a wonderful winter project — minimal effort, just salt and time — and the payoff is an olive with twice the punch of anything in a jar.
A olives101 how-to.