In Focus: The Coquillo Olive

The Coquillo is one of those small olives that punches far above its size on a cheese board. Grown in southeastern Spain, it is briny, faintly bitter and almost spherical, with a pit that takes up most of the fruit. It is also the great understudy of the olive world.

A small olive with a big pit

Coquillo trees grow mainly in the Murcia region of southeastern Spain, along the warm Mediterranean coast. The fruit is little, round and brown-to-black when ripe, with thin, soft flesh wrapped around a notably large stone. You do not eat a Coquillo for its meat — there isn’t much — you eat it for its punchy, salty, slightly smoky character and the way it disappears between your teeth. Harvest comes late, from November into December, once the fruit has fully coloured on the tree. It is a table olive through and through, not an oil cultivar, and its appeal is entirely about that concentrated little hit of flavour.

The Niçoise stand-in

Here’s the open secret of the deli counter: the Coquillo is the olive most often sold as — or in place of — a French Niçoise. The two are close cousins, similar in size, colour and brine. Genuine Niçoise olives are scarce and pricey, so Spanish Coquillo, cured in the same water-and-sea-salt fermentation for roughly three months, fills the gap. There is nothing dishonest in that — a well-cured Coquillo is a lovely olive in its own right. But if a label says “Niçoise-style” rather than plain Niçoise, this little Spaniard is very often what’s in the jar.

Drawn from grower descriptions and specialty-food trade references.