Table Olive Production
Before I will explain what we do with the table olives, I would like to mention that preparing table olives
could be a food safety hazard if you don't know what you are doing.
Table olives are classified as a medium risk food product as we are dealing with
micro organisms and food poisoning bacteries could grow if we are not careful.
When we started with commercial table olive processing Kathy and I established a HACCP plan ( Hazard
Analysis and Critical Control Points)as an aid to ensure that we were producing consistently safe food products.
Over the years it became obvious that there were many holes in this food safety plan and during 2006 I have created a
Food Safety Management system for Table Olives Processing, based upon the international standard ISO AS22000.
This has given us the confidence that we are producing a safe food product.
The Process:
There are many many ways of debittering olives but in general, in the industry, there are three methods in use
1: Californian Method
2: Spanish Method
3: Greek method
Both the Californian and Spanish methods use Sodium Hydroxide, commonly known as caustic soda.
This caustic soda is used to penetrate the skin of the olives which allows the water and soda mixture to enter the flesh of the olive.
Once it has penetrated part or the whole of the flesh of the olive it is washed out and in doing so the process dissolves the bitterness.
This is quick and efficient...and time is money!
The Greek method uses no chemicals and is a natural process.
We, at Gooramadda Olives, use the Greek method.
This process is called:
Natural Fermentation
This is where we store the olives once they are harvested:
We fill the fermentation vessels with a brine solution and with olives and we slightly correct the pH to ensure that no nasty bacteries can grow in the brine solution.
24 hours later you will notice that fermentation has started, a large amount of small bubbles will rise to the surface and bacteries and yeasts are busy with converting natural sugars into a vast array of flavours.
Fermentation will continue until all sugars have been consumed.
During this fermentation, the salty water will penetrate slowly through the skin of the olives into the flesh and neutralizes the bitterness.
This produces a good table olive, however, the drawback is that it can take anything between 8 and 14 months before the olives are ready.
Once the olives have lost their bitterness and fermentation has stopped, we transport the olives to the bottling area and start filling jars.
On the picture above you can see how we transport the olives.
We tip the content of the fermentation vessel into a sink and separate the olives from the fermentation liquid.
For black olives we keep the fermentation liquid as it to become the packing brine for in the olives in the jars.
Each and every olives is being looked at and we discard all olives which have blemishes or are of incorrect size.
The final product is then presented to our visitors
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