BajaNomad

Valle de Guadalupe olive harvest

vandy - 9-12-2019 at 04:52 AM

Last year the olive and grape harvests
failed due to drought.

Anybody know how they're doing this year?
There's nothing like fresh olive oil!
Fresh wine?
Maybe not...

Once you've tried fresh olive oil,
you can never buy the supermarket
stuff again.

elgatoloco - 9-12-2019 at 03:55 PM

We will be down there for the first week of October. We will ask around.

AKgringo - 9-12-2019 at 04:08 PM

I used to pick olives in the Citrus Heights (CA) area, then home cure them.

I have purchased jars of fresh cured olives along your route that equaled my best efforts.

Don Jorge - 9-12-2019 at 07:38 PM

There will be a very, very small harvest and you had better know who, where and when to get any fresh pressed oil in the valley.

The olive fruit fly has ravaged the area's production for many years running. It is an extremely difficult pest to control and even when you follow a strict integrated pest management regime, if your neighbors don't do the same on their trees, and they won't, you are still hosed.

Thus, most of the boutique producer's of fresh oil oil in Guadalupe have quit the business. I know of some really nice Italian oil making equipment just collecting dust in the area.

Cetto will have oil though. They are on top of their crop and grow down in Llano Colorado too.

Santiago - 9-13-2019 at 05:51 AM

Quote: Originally posted by Don Jorge  

Cetto will have oil though. They are on top of their crop and grow down in Llano Colorado too.

DJ: where is Llano Colorado?

Don Jorge - 9-13-2019 at 07:49 AM

Chavo,

Llano Colorado is located off Hwy 1 not too far south of San Vicente.
It is a beautiful valley with deep, red, loamy soil. Ground water is abundant.

Back in the late 70s, early 80s, long before he passed away, Don Luis saw the potential of that area and developed a beautiful wine and olive producing ranch.

This was long time before Guadalupe became an appelation. At that time the Russian blooded folk in Guadalupe were actively removing grape acerage because Don Luis A Cetto and Domecq were the only buyers of wine grapes in the Valley. They were only paying the growers about $40 a ton, docked payments for quality and were acting like a cartel, which they basically were.

I remember Don Luis used to fly between TIJ, Guadalupe and Llano in his Cessna 421. Having grown up watching the tv program Sky King, the sight of that plane coming and going from Guadalupe always made me look up and dream. Just another memory of how it was.

caj13 - 9-18-2019 at 11:31 AM

good crop in the central valley of California this year. they just started picking. i have 5 gallons currently curing in lye.

They will be split into regular, garlic infused, and serrano pepper infused.

I don't eat store bought olives anymore, i like the home made ones!

[Edited on 9-18-2019 by caj13]

AKgringo - 9-18-2019 at 12:05 PM

You are making me hungry! I am in northern CA right now, maybe I should go find some trees to pick!

Do you bother to turn them black? I always thought that the extra steps was just to hide bruises! One year I did a batch green, slow cured Spanish style

caj13 - 9-19-2019 at 10:25 AM

Quote: Originally posted by AKgringo  
You are making me hungry! I am in northern CA right now, maybe I should go find some trees to pick!

Do you bother to turn them black? I always thought that the extra steps was just to hide bruises! One year I did a batch green, slow cured Spanish style

Yeah i do mine green, black is just a series of exposures to air. in my opinion, it also softens up the flesh, makes em a bit mushy.

The ones i do stay green, firm and have a mild olive taste (not like the green olives comercially available) . and then you can taste the infussion. i put up 5 gallons of olives every year, they last me 3 or 4 months each year.

I used to pick em - go by peoples houses with trees in the yard and knock on the door - they usually would let me pick, or around our Leaky acres" the water table soak in spot - they have olives lining the ponds you could pick.
but I like the bigger milder olives better, If i remember correctly, my prefered variety is Sevillano, bigger and milder than the more common (Manzanillos and missions, smaller with more oil in the flesh) I have a local orchard that grows em, costs me 35 bucks for a 5 gallon bucket picked sorted - worth not getting up on ladders and stuck with spines and covered with dust. the farmer doesn';t even advertise, they sell all of their olives locally to long time customers (they have about 20 acres of olive trees)

AKgringo - 9-19-2019 at 12:11 PM

Sounds like what I used to do. Around Citrus Heights, there were subdivisions that were carved out of old olive orchards. Many yards had trees that the homeowners were glad to have me pick the olives before they became a purple mess!

The thing I found to be important, was sorting the olives so that any batch consisted of olives of the same size, and ripeness because that affects the time required for soaking. You don't want the lye solution reaching the pit!

caj13 - 9-19-2019 at 03:59 PM

exactly right, timing the lye penetration is the key. i cut a few open every 2 hours or so, you can see where the penetration has got to. i pull em and start soaking out the lye just before it gets to the pits,

For that to happen - you need uniform sizes. I usually sort into 3 sizes, to make sure I get optimal penetration in all of them.

but if you pull em early, and lye doesnt get all the way through - its terrible - bitter and nasty! how they ever figured out to soak em in poison to make the olive edible, I'll never know, but it sure is great when they get done right!

AKgringo - 9-19-2019 at 06:46 PM

The acid in the olive is neutralized by the alkali of the lye. I have never tried it, but I read about a process that used a slurry of hardwood ash and water (possibly salt as well).

vandy - 9-19-2019 at 08:18 PM

The delicious pale green olives I bought
several times in the Ruta del Vino area
we're so different from any I'd had before:
Very little, if any salt; firm but yielding to bite;
wonderful, delicate flavor I like to compare
to morels sauteed in butter.

They cost about $8US per gallon.
The fresh oil was 70-90 pesos per liter.

I always thought the huge salt content of
grocery store olives in the US had something
to do with the cure.
Thanks for straightening me out!
I thought maybe someone soaked
out the salt...

caj13 - 9-20-2019 at 08:11 AM

lye is for the "cure"
the salt is for long term preservation. If you will be eating them within a few weeks, you can use much less salt than if you are trying to store them for a couple of months. (they all need to be stored refridgerated in my opinion, makes em last alot longer)

I always take one gallon set it aside for longer term, it gets 2X as much salt as the ones we are eating near term.

Too much salt for me, so I will soak out some of that preservation salt (put em in clear water for a couple of hours) to reduce the salt hit. Need to use pickling salt BTW - Iodized salt leaves a funny aftertaste, and has some anticaking chemical in it as well.

here is the guide i use, from UC Davis, I have been using this guide for 30 years!
https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8267.pdf



[Edited on 9-20-2019 by caj13]

[Edited on 9-21-2019 by caj13]