Once you’ve read this, you’ll never throw away the liquid from a jar of olives again!
If you buy olives in a jar, packed in water, you might pour that liquid straight through a sieve and down the sink when you drain the olives. What a waste! Because that liquid has an incredible amount of flavor…
Unlike olive oil, which is good for you because of its high content of healthy fats, olive brine contains quite a lot of salt, which means it isn’t necessarily considered healthy by the Netherlands Nutrition Centre. But you can absolutely use the liquid if you then add a little less salt to the rest of the dish, because it has far too much flavor of its own to simply throw away!
Juice hoarders
As you know, we don’t throw away pasta cooking water either (at least, not all of it), and we’re also enthusiastic hoarders of pickle juice for brining chicken (some editorial colleagues even drink the pickle juice straight from the jar…). And you can do more with olive juice (that’s what we’ll conveniently call it, even though we’re not talking about a glass of blended olives from the blender) than you might think:
Savory and flavorful
The liquid has a savory, umami flavor, making it particularly suitable for marinating meat. You can also use it to give pasta sauce a delicious Mediterranean flavor, or stir a splash into yogurt dipping sauce for a complex salty touch. The same goes for salad dressings; it will instantly make your salad less boring!
Drink it dirty
And let’s not forget the classic dirty martini. What makes a drink (usually a cocktail, although a dirty orange juice is also hugely trendy) dirty is the addition of a splash of liquid that makes the drink a little cloudier or gives it a slightly different color or flavor. Come on in, olive juice! This is a really good recipe for a dirty martini. Cheers!
Let the great collecting begin
Now that you know all this, the great collecting can begin. I often have an assortment of ‘empty’ jars on the counter and in the refrigerator (much to The Husband’s annoyance), from which the main ingredient has already been fished out but whose juice I still want to use: olives, pickles, jalapeños, Amsterdam onions—even the liquid from a can of Spanish squid ‘escabeche’ that I recently poured into a jar. You can do so much with it!
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