The green olives selected carefully are first cracked then processed with natural and traditional methods without any additives.
Cracked Green Olives will bring you a taste of the Aegean.
Sele, which is also the name of the kind of basket in which they are stored, involves a lot of salt. For 100 kg of olives, 10 kg fine salt plus 15 kg coarse salt is added layer by layer on top of the olives. After resting for 2-3 days, the basket is turned upside-down every other day or every 3 days. The idea is that the salt must penetrate the olives and the bitter juices gradually seep out. After 2-4 weeks, this bitterness will have disappeared and they will be ready to eat. They are sieved but not washed because without that salt, they will go bad. If you buy sele yourself, you will have to soak them in cold water at home before they are fit to eat. In Turkey Gemlik grown in the Gemlik area near Bursa is the most common type of olive and is sold as a breakfast olive or sofralık zeytin. These are small to medium-sized black olives and are treated in one of two basic ways: sele and salamura. I have to confess that I was a bit hazy about these myself so doing some reading on the subject prior to blogging about it proved fascinating.
One of the indispensible food items for breakfast in Turkey is olives. Whether green or black, plain or with sauce, olives must exist on every Turkish person’s breakfast table. In order to break away the bitterness, green olives are cracked but still served as a whole with the pit. In smaller towns, families purchase large quantities of fresh olives once a year which they crack and cure for the year’s supply. Black olives are not pitted or cracked and cured in such away that there is no trace of the bitterness.
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