Why You're Better Off Leaving Canned Olives On The Shelves

These days, many Americans are first exposed to olives in canned form — more specifically, those pitted black olives you might find gracing a delivery pizza or mixed into pasta salad. The mild salty flavor and perfectly kid finger-sized holes offer a certain appeal (especially to children). However, while there are many canned ingredients that are totally worth buying – such as tomatoes and seafood — you might want to avoid canned olives if you like flavor in your food.

All olives must be cured to remove a chemical called oleuropin, which makes them extremely bitter when raw. There are several different methods for curing olives which yield quite different flavor profiles and textures in the final product. The method used for most canned olives involves taking green olives, chemically curing them with lye, and then treating them with an iron compound called ferrous gluconate (this is what turns canned olives unnaturally black). Although this method is the most common, cheapest, and quickest way to process olives, it's terrible for preserving flavor and texture. The resulting olives are rubbery, extremely mild, vaguely salty, and generally a shadow of what olives can be. While they're not necessarily unpleasant scattered over nachos or used as adorable cream cheese penguin appetizers, only eating canned olives would be like sticking to Red Delicious apples or Wonder Bread — in other words, incredibly bland and boring.

Humans have been harvesting and enjoying olives for thousands of years — in fact, olive trees are some of the oldest cultivated fruit trees (yes, olives are a fruit). As such, there are many delicious methods for curing and preserving olives that were around long before cans were even invented. Brine-cured, water-cured, and dry-cured olives all offer far more flavor depth and complexity than the lye-cured kind, but the most accessible (and many would agree most flavorful) variety is brine-cured olives.

Jarred olives in brine are easy to find at most grocery stores. Many varieties of brined olives can be bought in bulk jars, which will stay good stored in the fridge for months after opening. However, some varieties of jarred olives, like Manzanillas, are also traditionally lye-cured, so jarred olives aren't guaranteed to not be processed with lye.

Olive bars are also a great option and offer maximum flavor, freshness, and variety. Although fresh olives from an olive bar have a much shorter shelf life than jarred or canned olives, they can be safely preserved for a couple of weeks in the fridge, and their outstanding depth of flavor and texture make them easy to finish off well before they go bad. As a bonus, whether you go for the jar or the bar, you can use the leftover olive brine to give marinades a flavor boost. The next time you're shopping for olives, branch out — there's a whole world of olive flavors and textures to be discovered and savored beyond bland cans.