How to Pit an Olive Without Any Fancy Tools

I have a confession: I used to hate olives. Like mushrooms and blue cheese and raw fish, they were one of those foods that scared me as a child, for no particular reason. But then, fewer years ago now than I’d care to admit, my mind—and palate—was changed. My gateway olive? The Castelvetrano, which became a whole lot less scary when I realized it tastes like salty olive oil in solid form. Now, I love the way their grassy salinity plays off tomatoes and chile flakes in apastadish, and the contrast they provide when paired with juicy honeydew in asalad. But most of all, I love the way they taste whole, jazzed up with somecitrus and spices.

没多久,我开始合并olives into the meals I cook at home. But the first time I did so, I was faced with a question: Should I buy pitted or unpitted olives? And if I do buy olives with pits, how do I go about pitting them to use in, say, thatchicken marbellaI was planning on making? If these questions strike a chord with you, read on: I spoke with a food stylist and cookbook author, a line cook, and a grocery store owner to find out the best way to pit olives at home, and the argument for pitting them yourself. Here’s the briny truth:

What’s the best way to pit olives at home?

I’ll cut to the chase: You don’t need any special tools or gadgets to pit olives at home. Every person I talked to agreed that the best tool for the job is a knife, plain and simple. But the type of knife you use, andhowyou use it, depends on personal preference and the type of olive you’re pitting.

Phoebe Fry, a former line cook at beloved New York City restaurantsCervo’sandHart’s, pits olives at home and in the restaurant kitchen by placing them on a flat surface and firmly pressing down on the side of herchef's knifeto break open their flesh, after which she coaxes the pits out with her fingers. “It's low-tech but effective,” she says, “and while it takes a little time, so does any olive-pitting method in my experience.” For most types of olives, this is the easiest (and fastest) way to go, because you don’t have to fiddle with separating the meat from each side, and you can crush more than one olive at once.

The Best Chef’s Knife, Tested and Reviewed

Food stylist, recipe developer, andcookbookauthorSusan Spungenagrees that smashing the olive with a chef’s knife is often the way to go—“But there are a couple of caveats,” she notes. The meat of some olive varieties, such as Castelvetranos, can cling very tightly to the pit, which means you may be better off using a paring knife to slice the lobes off the sides of the olive. Oil-cured black olives, on the other hand, often don’t require a knife for pitting—just tear the olive right off the pit. Then there are tiny Niçoise olives, which are so small that they’re nearly impossible to pit at home. Spungen’s advice? “Just serve them with pits and a warning.”

Christine Sahadi Whelan,cookbookauthor and owner of Middle Eastern grocery storeSahadi’s, favors the paring knife method for most types of olives; after slicing off the four sides of the olive, she uses her fingers to pull off the two remaining ends to avoid accidentally cutting into the pointed end of the pit. But, she warns, “you have to have a really sharp knife. Olives are round, and they roll.”

你应该买一个橄榄pitte吗r?

Special olive pitting tools do exist (often marketed as cherry-slash-olive pitters), but none of the culinary professionals I spoke with had used them, nor were particularly optimistic about their effectiveness: “Cherries are soft, they’re round, and they have that little divot, so when you push the pit out, it comes out fairly neatly,” explains Whelan. Because the meat of an olive tends to stick to the pit more than a cherry’s does, and because olives can range from round to oblong, they’re not prime candidates for use with cherry pitters or similar gadgets. You’ll save yourself time, money, and drawer space by using a sharp knife that you already have.

Is there a downside to buying pre-pitted olives?

Whelan prefers unpitted olives over the kind sold without their pits. “Texture and flavor change when you pit something,” she explains, “due to the nature of sitting in the brine, and the brine going directly into the olive as opposed to it being protected by the skin.” This means that a pre-pitted (that is, mechanically-pitted) olive is going to be saltier and mushier than one you’ve pitted yourself—though that textural change will be less noticeable for firmer varieties such as Castelvetranos than it is for softer olives, like Kalamatas and black olives. Spungen added that, flavor and texture aside, she prefers the organic look of a hand-pitted, torn olive over that of a mechanically-pitted one, especially within the context of her work as a food stylist.

Still, pre-pitted olives certainly have a time and place: Whelan, Fry, and Spungen all agree that when making things liketapenadeor dressing, there’s no harm in buying a jar of pitted olives—you’ll save yourself a whole lot of time, and, because the olives are getting finely chopped anyway, you needn't worry about any textural differences. Sahadi’s sells so much Greek salad that hand-pitting olives is neither a viable option, nor is it necessary given that the Kalamatas they use are accompanied by a medley of other flavors and textures (feta, red onion, and Persian cucumber, to name a few). The same is true of a tuna crudo Fry remembers from the menu at Hart’s, in which chopped pitted green olives got mixed with shallots, vinegar, and olive oil before being spooned over thin slices of raw fish.

So, there are pros and cons to using pitted versus unpitted olives.Don’tdrive yourself mad trying to pit five hundred olives for that big batch of tapenade, a pasta in which the olives are chopped and cooked down, or a salad meant to feed fifty people.Doopt for unpitted olives when the scale is smaller—especially when you’re serving them alone or in recipes where their flavor and texture really shine. Now go forth and make all theputtanesca,tagine, andNiçoiseyour heart desires—just make sure you’ve got your knife at the ready.