Friends came this past weekend to help us pick the olives in our garden.
Our trees are not pruned and therefor our harvest was small. We got a grand total of 1.5 buckets! We decided we would press the olives to make our own oil…even if just a small amount! This required a first-ever visit to the local olive press. It was a bustling place and quickly obvious that the job of bringing the olives to be pressed was assigned to the elder members of the families.
I (rather sheepishly) presented our 1.5 buckets of olives to the woman at the counter. A look of “I don’t know what to do with this foreign woman" crossed her face. Obviously, our amount of olives was not their standard/typical amount given to the press.
She first weighed the olives. We had a total of about 10 kg (22 pounds). She explained this would produce about 1 Liter of olive oil. However, we would not get the oil from our own olives because it was such a small amount.
When I looked closer at the process, I fully understood why! This is a process designed to manage very large quantities of olives at a time!
It was decided that we would be given our amount of oil from the freshly pressed oil of someone else. Our olives would then be donated to their harvest.
Measuring out our allotted amount. I noticed she actually gave us about 2.5 Liters of oil I think they felt a little bad for us and our enthusiasm about our “harvest”!
We have yet to try the new oil. We were told we need to wait several weeks to let the flavor mellow.
