Bitter Oranges in Sevilla

The streets of Sevilla are lined with Bitter Orange trees, some 45,000 of them.   These trees are so emblematic of the city that they are also known as Seville Oranges.

In late winter the city begins to pick the oranges.  We happened to be in Sevilla when a crew worked on the trees behind my mother's house.

They worked pretty fast.  The trees were cleaned up in a matter of minutes.

Probably more time was spent looking for stranded oranges under cars than pulling them from the tree!

These oranges are too bitter to be eaten fresh.  Instead, they will be shipped to the UK and France, where they will become marmalade.  Their bitterness plays well against the sweetness of jam.  They also happen to have a higher pectin content than regular oranges, so it all works out in the end.

The peel is very fragrant, and it also gets used to make essential oils for the perfume and food industries.

When I was little, I remember boys rolling oranges into the path of incoming vehicles, timing their throws so that the oranges became road kill.  I didn't see any of those games this time.  Maybe there is a PlayStation version already?

I don't know how heavy this bag may be, but poking around in the net I saw that in 2010 about six million kilos were picked in the city (that's over 13 million pounds, or 6,600 US tons).  That's a lot of marmalade!

Note the row of orange trees on the left side of the street.  Pretty soon these trees will be covered in orange blossoms, shrouding the city in one of the most exquisite perfumes ever found in nature. 

My mom and some handsome dude wanted to pose in this picture.  I want to take this opportunity to introduce him to the world.  His name is Ron.  He will be making an occasional appearance in this blog, and I want to call him by his name, not by "my husband", "the husband", "husband", or God forbid, "the mister" (yes, I saw that in a blog once...)

Do you like marmalade?  How do you eat it?  One of my easy go-to appetizers is a crostini with Manchego cheese topped with a dollop of marmalade.  This is a variation of the classic Manchego-quince paste combo, which one of these days we should explore.

Traveling on alpargatas

Things have been pretty quiet around here because we were out of town.  We went to visit our mothers.  First, to Florida.  Then, to Seville, Spain.  It was a tough trip, in many regards.  It was cold everywhere.  We were sick with the flu.  The airlines, as usual, did not cooperate, and we had to endure long waits in different time zones.  Traveling is already an unpleasant chore when you are in perfect health, so to do it when sick is something I do not recommend to anyone.

While we were in Seville we didn't do a whole lot, compared to other trips, but one day I managed to snap a picture of some very colorful espadrilles, or alpargatas, the traveling footwear of my countrymen for so many centuries. The evolution of the alpargata is amazing, in an Ugly Duckling sort of way.  From its humble beginnings as a peasant shoe, it has been reinterpreted by luxury icons like Prada and Jimmy Choo.  If the first alpargatero could raise his head!

I am slowly getting back to my routine, and in the next few days I hope to tell you a few stories about our vacation.  It is nice to be back, but it is also a bit sad.  I miss everybody.

Happy Monday.

Curing olives: score & soak

Olives are very bitter in their raw state. The first thing you need to do is get rid of the compounds responsible for that bitterness. There are a few ways to go about it. You can use lye, a great method if you are impatient. I don't like it because it robs the olives from some of their fruity flavors. You can use salt, which is so much fun, and the olives come out delicious! I wish I had enough olives to salt-cure a few. Next year...

I am going to use water. It's a safe, easy method, and the olives come out great. The basic principle is to soak the olives in plain water, and change that water every day. Little by little, the bitterness will wash away.

To speed the leaching up a bit, I scored each olive using this tool.

I bought this board a few years ago in a hardware store in Seville. It's made of beech wood, and has four little metal "blades" in each of the holes. Each hole is a different diameter. You place the board over a bowl or bucket, and push the olives through the holes.

You can achieve the same results with a paring knife and a bit of patience, or you can smash the olives, instead of scoring them. Smashed olives are super-authentic, and you'll see them in every bar in Andalucia. To smash them, the only thing you need are a hard surface and a mallet. Also, I highly recommend you wear a pair of gloves. Otherwise, you'll sport very black fingers for a few days.

So once your olives are smashed or scored, put them in water, and change it every day. Rule of thumb is about two weeks for green olives. Mine are pretty ripe, so I'll start biting into them around day 5 or so, just to gauge the level of bitterness. I don't mind if the olives stay a little bitter. Every element, in its just measure, adds complexity to the overall flavor.

Curing olives: harvest

I have been curing olives since I was six years old, when we moved into my grandfather’s house. One of my first memories from that time is when his cousin sent him 60 lbs of Manzanilla olives from his hometown. My grandfather, who was in his seventies at the time and had moved to Seville as a teenager, still remembered many of these country things. I accompanied him on walks around the neighborhood, looking for ingredients for the olives in abandoned lots. Some years later, after my grandfather's passing, I remember walking past those same lots, the herbs and plants long gone and replaced by trash and junky cars. It was sad to see how the urban makeup of my neighborhood changed in just a few years.

You cannot eat olives straight from the tree. They are so bitter you’ll want to scrub the inside of your mouth with a brillo pad. That bitterness needs to be leached out first. Once that’s done, you brine and season them. It is amazing how something that originally was so unpleasant ends up being so delicious.

We have a young olive tree in front of our house. This year was not a good one. We had a wet spring and a cool summer. During bloom, all that rain knocked off a whole lot of flowers. My crop was this little, barely two cups’ worth.

There are some old olive trees at the community college near our house. We drove by on Sunday to see if we could perhaps supplement our crop. Sadly, the trees were completely bare: not a single olive on them. Olive trees are notorious for their alternate bearing tendency. Some years they are loaded, some years there’s nothing. Last year these trees were so full we were able to fill a three-gallon bucket easily.

So my 2011 harvest is what it is. I have a handful of pockmarked, scarred olives. They are not stellar, by any means. I’m going to cure them anyway. Stay tuned.