olives day 1

Last week a friend dropped off almost 20 pounds of fresh olives. Apparently I have the reputation for a willingness to deal with free food that is labor intensive. This is the same friend who brought me pounds upon pounds of quince. So my knowledge of curing olives is about zero, which meant I headed straight to the internet and luckily found some suggestions that seems valid enough. The only trouble is that you don't know if the experiment is going to work until you are at least a month in, probably even longer. With so many olives, I decided to try 2 methods.
Method 1: Slice each (and every) olive and dump in a bucket filled with cold water. Alternately you can gently bash them with a mallet or rolling pin, I did some of each as an experiment, Make sure they are all fully submerged and put the container into the fridge. Once a day for about a month, dump out the water and fill with fresh water. When the olives are palatable, fill bucket with brine and season with herbs and spices as you please.

Method 2: Place all un-rinsed olives into a bucket, fill with vinegar salt solution and put into a cool dark place. Every month or so, dump out solution, don't rinse olives(!) and re-fill with fresh brine. In about 6 months they should be tasty.

Since this is is such a long term project with variable outcomes, I'm not giving you the exact recipes until I know they work. But I will give you the link to the methods I'm following. I'll update you as we get further along.