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Hold the pimento, please

There's more to olives than green and black
From the chef | Search restaurants | Archives

May 16th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
When served with a tangy dip, fried olives make for a wonderful and easy starter.
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Olives were a staple of ancient Mediterranean civilizations. They are now considered essential to recipes all across the world.
Fried olives

Ingredients
430 grams (15 ounces) black Greek olives
➤ 430 grams green Greek olives
100 grams cheddar cheese, grated
50 grams chilli peppers, chopped
350 grams corn flakes
150 grams plain white flour
3 eggs
500 grams peanut oil
Salt
500 grams mayonnaise (home made is best)
Preparation
Remove olive pits.
Fill olives with a mixture of grated cheddar and chopped chilli peppers and set aside.
Crush corn flakes very fine, so the texture resembles semolina.
Beat eggs.
Prepare a small plate covered with flour.
Bread the olives the usual way: roll in flour, dip in beaten eggs, then roll in corn flakes.
Heat peanut oil to 190–220 C (375–430 F).
Fry olives until golden brown.
Use mayonnaise as a dip.

Raw olives contain a bitter chemical that makes them inedible, and cooking doesn’t destroy the harsh flavor. Only curing, whether in salt, brine, oil or lye, prepares the popular fruit for human consumption. Lye works quickly, so many of the varieties found in supermarkets or on pizzas are lye-cured.
In part because each method changes the flavor of an olive — and also because olives can be cured raw or at any stage through ripeness — distinctly different flavors can develop, even from the same variety. As olives ripen, their soft green color fades, first into a reddish brown and finally to black. Flavors mature over this period. More interesting and complex flavors emerge the longer an olive cures.
There are hundreds of olive varieties, ranging in flavor from sweet and nutty to salty or bitter. Some of the more popular varieties include Spain’s small and slightly bitter Arbequinas; large, meaty Cerignolas from Italy; Kalamata olives from Greece, cured in red wine vinegar and very dense in flavor; and Manzanillas, the kind stuffed with pimentos, grown in Spain and California. Mission olives are the black equivalent of Manzanillas, found on pizzas and in cans, but not very fulfilling. Nicoise, on the other hand, are potently sour and a critical part of the famed salad.
Oldrich Sahajdak, executive chef for the Ambiente Restaurant Group, reminds that olives pick up bitterness when overcooked, so you typically add them to a recipe toward the end of the process. He also recommends, in this case, placing olives in the freezer for five minutes before breading. The flour-egg-corn flake combination will adhere better.
Oldrich Sahajdak is chef at Ambiente, located at Mánesova 59, Prague 2–Vinohrady. Tel. 222 727 851.


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