SC - de-pitting olives?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:
> 
> hey all from Anne-Marie
> 
> Stefan asks:
> >I then proceeded to try to cut the olives off the seeds. Is there some
> >trick to this??? I gave up after only a dozen or two olives and ended up
> >more with little chunks of olive rather than nice halves or the just
> >empty
> >olives that I saw in the store. Surely you don't leave the seeds in for
> >most dishes?
> 
> funny you should ask :)
> Martha Stewards show today included a segment on olives! they suggested
> pitting them either by individually slitting them on one side and
> squooshing out the pit, or the chef did a neat trick where he put the olive
> on the cutting board and wacked it with the flat of his chef knife. Left a
> big flat olive you could easily take the pit out. They kinda sprung back
> into a vague olive shape after. kinda...
> 
> I was wondering why they didnt just use one of those cherry pitter gizmos
> (I guess that depends on the size of the olive, of course....)
> 
> good luck! olives are one of Gods perfect foods....(real olives, not the
> black things in cans from California)

Ahh G-d, to think I should live to see the day when I find myself in
agreement with Martha Stewart, or, rather, one of her underpaid,
anonymous researchers...

It used to be part of my prep mise en place at Bouley, every morning for
several months, to produce a quart of 1/8" brunoise (essentially, tiny
dice) of French green olives. If you're just chopping them roughly, I
agree, squooshing them with the flat of your knife works well, as does
simply squeezing them between finger and thumb (Fighter's Winter Kitchen
Exercise #24, to be specific) until you can feel the pit on both sides,
then just kind of push it through. Whether this works, though, or how
well, will depend on the type of olive you have. Those neatly pitted
[mechanically] olives are unripe (black or green, they're unripe),
whereas many of the black or green real olives you buy packed in wine,
oil, or brine are ripe, and are still tenaceously clinging to their
pits, while still soft enough to not survive the pitting process well.

My best advice is to look for oil-cured black olives (they look like
little prunes; a major exporter is Morocco, but France produces them
too) and then you can easily do the squoosh. This should work with any
moderately soft olive. For firm ones, just get the biggest ones you can
find. (Ripe or unripe, oil-packed olives seem to be the firmest --
oil-cured isn't the same thing as oil-packed.) Of course the bigger the
olive, the bigger the pit, too, but it still makes it easier to do any
kind of fine detail work such as the aforementioned 1/8" dice. You
should be able to take two large oval slices, like fillets, off the
sides of the olive. Cut with a slightly curved motion and go along the
edges of the pit, kinda like taking a very small apple off the core.
You'll then get two smaller pieces off the other two sides.

Use the sharpest knife possible -- a small paring knife is good for
this. 

I don't have much to add, except that you can sometimes buy pitted black
oil-cured olives, which is a great timesaver for making tapenade and
such, but I highly recommend that you feel through them with your
fingertips to see of there are any errant pits in there. There's nothing
quite so satisfying as watching the top of someone else's blender or
food processor shooting off into space and knowing you also don't have
to clean it up...  

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com