Safe Home Preparation of Table Olives: The UC ANR Reader’s Guide

The UC Guide and American Olive Farmer

American Olive Farmer’s Reader’s Guide to UC ANR Publication 8267, Olives: Safe Methods for Home Pickling—a peer-reviewed, 26-page resource for safely curing and preserving fresh olives at home.

UC Agriculture and Natural Resources published Olives: Safe Methods for Home Pickling in June 2007. Its curing instructions remain an invaluable resource, but the brief portrait of California olive growing on its opening page now reads as a snapshot of another era.

Although California’s olive industry has changed considerably in nineteen years, the reason I continue to recommend this publication has not. The UC ANR document remains a detailed, research-based guide to safely curing and preserving fresh olives at home.

At 26 pages, however, Publication 8267 contains far more information than most first-time olive curers need at once. Water curing, brining, dry-salt curing, Sicilian-style fermentation, and several lye-curing methods follow one another with few visual stopping points.

I created this Reader’s Guide simply to help you find the method you need, see where it begins and ends, and then return to the University’s complete instructions.

We share access to the complete publication with every American Olive Farmer fresh olive order. This page is a companion to the UC guide, not a substitute for it.

UC ANR recently re-indexed Publication 8267. The web address has changed, but the button above opens the same peer-reviewed June 2007 publication.

Why We Rely on UC ANR

The University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources connects University research and Cooperative Extension expertise with California agriculture and the public. For home olive curing, that matters.

We rely on Publication 8267 because it is:

1. Method-agnostic. It does not prescribe one preferred style of olive. Readers can learn about water curing, brining, dry-salt curing, fermentation, or lye treatment.
2. Grounded in food science. The publication explains not only what to do, but the conditions needed to cure and preserve olives safely.
3. Explicit about what happens after curing. Debittering an olive and preserving it for storage are not the same operation. The guide addresses both.

The breadth that makes Publication 8267 authoritative can also make it intimidating. You may be interested only in water-curing cracked Sevillano olives, for example, and have no intention of working with lye. There is no reason you should have to hunt through several unrelated methods to find the pages you need.

That is the purpose of the Reader’s Guide below.

The Reader’s Guide

UC ANR Publication 8267: Olives: Safe Methods for Home Pickling

Use this as a table of contents. Choose the preparation you intend to make, then read the complete corresponding pages in the UC publication before beginning.