Olives in Greece

Greek cuisine is known for the versatile use of the olive, making Greece one of the largest producers of olives in the world! Greece is full of beautiful olive trees, some of which have been there for more than a hundred years. The beginnings of olive cultivation began around 3500 BC and since then the olive has actually become indispensable. Olives and olive oil are used for many applications. We also have some of these products in our range, think of the olive oil briquettes, olive oil soap, olive jam, olive paste or pasta sauce with olives.  You can use loose olives in several ways within Greek cuisine: you can of course eat them loose or serve them as snacks (mezedes), but also in Greek salads (Kalamata olives should not be missing, for example).

Harvesting and preparing Greek olives

When the olives are ripe, they can be picked in different ways. The best way to preserve the optimum flavour of the olive is to pick them by hand. This allows you to pick only the ripe olives and leave the less ripe ones hanging. However, this is very time-consuming and on a large scale, other ways are therefore used. Using shaking machines and collection nets, the olives are shaken from the tree and collected. After this, the leaves and twigs are removed and only the olives remain. The olives are not edible at this stage; they have a very bitter taste. To get rid of this, several ways can be applied. The most common way is pickling, which involves soaking the olives in a brine bath for several months, which removes the bitter taste. Now the olives are ready to be packed.

Types of olives

In our range, you will find two types of olives. The Kalamata olive is the most popular, standard to be found in Greek salads, for example. The Kalamata olive is a PDO product which means that only olives from Kalamata are allowed to carry the name 'Kalamata', otherwise they are given the name Kalamon. The olive is known for its powerful flavour and deep purple colour. An olive we definitely recommend!

The chalkidiki olive

Chalkidiki are olives from the region of Chalkidiki. These are large green olives harvested early in the season. As they are large olives, they can be stuffed with, for example, peppers or garlic. The olives have fresh flavour, and are a delicious mezede.

Sizes:

Olives come in different sizes. You can find the corresponding names in the product descriptions to know whether they are large or smaller olives. The order from large to small is as follows: mammoth, colossal, giants, extra jumbo, jumbo, extra large, large and fine.