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Spanish
Olives have an excellent flavor and texture unlike any olive in
the world. We have been importing these olives since
the early
1940s because of their quality. Here are a few interesting facts
about the Spanish Olive.
How
Olives are Harvested:
Both green and ripe olives are harvested at the same time when
the olives are green. After
picking, the olives are very bitter
and tough.
Eating one of these would make for an unpleasant
experience. Incoming fruit is first sorted
for quality and then
sized for specific bottling
needs.
How Olives are Cured:
The curing process
for green olives consists of hydrolysis,
leaching and fermentation. This process includes soaking the
olives in an
alkaline solution (caustic
soda) to remove the
bitter tannins. They are then placed in fresh water, which is
changed on a regular basis to
leach out any
impurities.
The olives are then placed
in huge underground vats, covered with a strong salt brine and
left to
ferment for 60-90 days. Fermentation converts the natural
sugars and some added sugar to lactic acid.
Only after the pH drops
to 3.7 and the lactic acid exceeds 5% are the olives ready for
bottling. The
olives are kept in a
salt brine while waiting
for the stuffing and bottling process. To retain their yellow-green
hue, the olives are never
exposed to
oxygen.
How olives are stuffed:
For centuries, olives were pitted and stuffed by hand. Today
everything is done by machines. Sweet Spanish Pepper (pimiento)
is the most common stuffing. After harvesting the peppers are
placed in brine
and shipped to the Seville area where the peppers
are ground and mixed with gelling agents to make a reconstituted
paste. The
paste is then
cut and formed into ribbons that are
fed into pitting and stuffing machines. The machines pit the
olive, take the pimiento and
cut them into
small pieces and
stuff them into the olives all in one smooth operation. Over
1000 olives can be stuffed per hour.
How Olives are Packed:
The olives arrive at our dock in large plastic barrels.
We then determine, based on
our incoming orders, how to stuff
the pitted olives.
Either with almonds, onions, jalapeno peppers,
garlic, etc. Then there are two ways we
can pack the olives
into the jars. One is called
Throw Packed where the olives
are not placed in the jar in any particular order and
another
called Place Packed where the
olives are carefully placed
into the jars in orderly, symmetrical fashions or forming
geometrical
shapes.
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