• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
Umami Days

Umami Days

Meaty with a dash of veggies

  • Course
    • One Bowl Meals
    • Breakfast
    • Lunch / Dinner
      • Appetizers
      • Salads
      • Soups
      • Main Courses
      • Side Dishes
      • Sweets
    • Snacks
    • Drinks
      • Summer drinks
      • Cold weather drinks
      • Cocktail hour
  • Ingredient
    • Chicken, duck & turkey
    • Meat
    • Seafood
    • Eggs
    • Mushrooms
    • Tofu
    • Vegetables
    • Rice & grains
    • Noodles
    • Bread
  • Kitchen
    • How-tos
    • Ingredients
    • Tools
  • Subscribe
  • Food Tales
    • Edible Garden
    • Dining
  • Subscribe
  • Recipe index
    • By Meal
      • One Bowl Meals
      • Breakfast
      • Lunch / Dinner
        • Appetizers
        • Salads
        • Soups
        • Main Courses
        • Side Dishes
        • Sweets
      • Snacks
      • Drinks
        • Summer drinks
        • Cold weather drinks
        • Cocktail hour
    • By Main Protein
      • Chicken, duck & turkey
      • Meat
      • Seafood
      • Eggs
      • Mushrooms
      • Tofu
      • Vegetables
    • By Carb
      • Rice & grains
      • Noodles
      • Bread
  • Kitchen
    • How-tos
    • Ingredients
    • Tools
  • Food Tales
    • Edible Garden
    • Dining
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Copyright
  • Contact
Ingredients Kitchen

Green and black olives: what’s the difference?

Published: 03.04.2021 » Last updated: 03.24.2022

The fruit of the olive tree has culinary uses other than as a source of oil. You find olives on pizza, pasta, canapes and even in cocktail drinks. They are sour and salty and slightly bitter.

Olives

What most people do not know is that the sourness and saltiness are the result of fermentation and curing. In its raw state, the olive is hardly palatable. It has to be soaked in brine or undergo some other form of curing in order to make it palatable.

What is the difference between green and black olives?

In the market, you’ll find green and black olives. They are often packed in jars and soaked in liquid.

Green olives are picked before the ripening begins. Black olives are picked after ripening. There is an exception though but more on that later.

Semi-ripe olives range from red to brown

Although most jars of olives in the grocery contain green or black olives, there are thesemi-ripeor “in-between” olives picked after the ripening process has begun but before they are fully ripe.

Olives in different dtages of ripeness

The colors of these olives vary depending on when exactly they were harvested.

Why do olives change color? They accummulateanthocyaninas they ripen.

Does the color of the olive affect the taste?

If you’re talking about olives picked right off the tree, the answer would be yes. But if you’re talking about olives in jars that land in out kitchens, the flavor of the olive, irrespective of color, is more affected by curing and processing than color.

How olives are “cured”

It’s a process of fermentation which can be a short as a few days (using lye) to several months (with salt or brine).

Some black olives are just “treated” upripe olives

As has been mentioned, real black olives are tree-ripened. Be wary though that not all black olives sold in the grocery are tree-ripened.

Black olives

Black olives, though labeled as “ripe” on supermarket cans, actually aren’t: these, a California invention, are green olives that have been cured in an alkaline solution, and then treated with oxygen and an iron compound (ferrous gluconate) that turns their skins a shiny patent-leather black.

The Bitter Truth About Olives” in National Geographic

California “black olives” are also the only commercially sold olives that did not undergo fermentation. The “alkaline solution” used in curing is lye in which the olives are soaked. “Treated with oxygen” means the olives are injected with compressed air. Repeating these two processes over and over until the lye has soaked through the pit of the olive turns it black.

Connie Veneracion

Lawyer by education. Journalist by accident. Home cook and writer by passion. Photographer by necessity. Good food, coffee and wine lover forever. Read more about me and Umami Days. Find me on Flipboard, Substack and Pinterest.

More Ingredients, Kitchen
The correct way to use an empanada maker / molder

The correct way to use an empanada maker / molder

Unshelled dried shrimps

Dried shrimps: how to buy, store and cook

Congee with Chinese sausage, crispy pork belly, egg, scallions and toasted garlic

How to cook congee (rice porridge) minus the myths

Edamame (fresh soy beans in pods)

How to cook edamame (fresh soy beans in pods)

Home baked white bread

Stages in making bread

Whole dressed chicken

Chicken parts: a shopping guide

Catfish farm

Best way to remove catfish slime

Slices of skin-on calabaza in a baking tray

What’s the difference between calabaza and pumpkin?

Split stalk of leek to remove traces of soil

Leeks: how to clean,cut and use in cooking

A stack of pancakes, made from scratch, topped with butter and drizzled with honey

Make perfect fluffy pancakes from scratch

Shrimps with pineapple and mango over rice

How to clean, peel and devein shrimps and prawns

Saffron soaking in hot water

That pinch of pricey saffron

Sidebar

Green beans tempura
  • About
  • Recipes
  • Privacy
  • Copyright
  • Contact

No AI is used in the creation of Umami Days content · Copyright © 2023 Connie Veneracion · All Rights Reserved