Recently, olives and olives began to appear frequently on our tables. On the shelves of shops there are a lot of varieties - with pitted, pitted, dried, stuffed. Everything is very delicious! But is it useful?
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Olives and olives - what is it
In our country, the misconception that olives are unripe olives has entrenched. That is, the olive fruit, taken from the tree in green, is the product that we call "olives", and the fruit ripened to black is, in our understanding, "olives. "
In fact, "olives" is an Old Slavonic word (borrowed from Greek) and exists only in our country. All over the world, the fruits of the olive tree, which have reached full maturity and darkened, are called " black olives", but not "olives."
To understand what we eat in the form of a product on which "Olives" is written, let's see how olives are distinguished by their degree of maturity and color.
1. Green olives. Unripe berries, quite hard due to the small accumulation of oil at this stage of maturity. Color varies from pale green to olive yellow. The taste is bitter.
2. Combined ripeness. The fruits are in the half-ripeness phase, while the berries are olive-colored, pink, purple, and those closest to ripeness acquire a chestnut color. The taste becomes a little softer, but there is still a noticeable bitterness. Such fruits are already used for squeezing oil, it is already quite a lot in them.
3. Totally ripe. Fruits at this stage acquire purple or black color, soft texture, oil saturation, some varieties are bitter. Part of the crop goes for processing in the form of marinades, pickles, pastes, while the bulk of ripe olives are for oil.
4. And another condition of olives, which we all call olives in Russia, is green olives that underwent a chemical treatment process to remove the bitterness and then turned anthracite-black.
Thus, the dark berries that we buy, thinking that these are ripe olives, are in fact, for the most part, unripe olives, stained with chemicals.
What determines the color of olives
One of the main parameters by which we can distinguish ripe olive from chemically colored is the heterogeneity of color. Among naturally ripened olives, it is difficult to find many exactly the same densely-anthracite colored berries. As a rule, they are all colored non-uniformly, since the sun's rays, which give the skin a saturated color, do not fall on all the fruits. And their color will be spotty and, as a rule, not coal-black, but purple, dark brown, brown.
And what happens to the green olives that are on the canning line? Some of them are washed, seeds are removed on a special machine, and then subjected to prolonged oxidation in an alkali solution (caustic soda). This is a rather aggressive environment called food additive E 524. Prolonged soaking in this solution allows you to remove the characteristic bitterness (oleuropein) from the berries and changes the color of the olives from green to black. Then the raw materials are neutralized with acid, washed with water, salt and iron gluconate are added to canned food as a color stabilizer (food supplement E 579). Sometimes you can find an analogue - iron lactate (E585). For the sake of fairness, it can be noted that these additives are approved for use in food products.
Further on technology, part of the unripe green olives is sent to the marinade without oxidation. So we get seedless green olives or stuffed with lemon, anchovy, etc. At the same time, the seed removal process is automated, and the berries are stuffed manually.
If you want to buy ripe olives, colored naturally and not oxidized, then your choice is canned with pits, as ripe dark berries become soft and it’s difficult to remove pits from them.