Red Olives

[mikeI]

I bought red olives this weekend at granville isle mkt. I was wandering if they are naturally that color or are they died some how.

I was under the impression that olives started out green, then turned to black, depending on how long they are left to ripen.

any body know about red olives??

[Dave Hatfield]

I bought red olives this weekend at granville isle mkt.  I was wandering if they are naturally that color or are they died some how.

I was under the impression that olives started out green, then turned to black, depending on how long they are left to ripen.

any body know about red olives??

←

Maybe they're kalamata's from Greece. Those are sort of a purple- red?

[chezcherie]

are they quite large? cerignolas come to mind--i've seen them in green (which, while a fairly vivid green, looks pretty natural) and red (which doesn't).

found this:

natural red dye?

[quattroporte]

If they are cerignola's, then yes, they are dyed. Even the green ones. The red and green combination usually comes out at Christmas, and lately I've spotted purple ones. Like, grape purple.

Weird.

[Batard]

We have a large local Italian market with at least a dozen types of olives, and they always have the large, red-dyed Cerignolas.

One thing I notice is that some trays of olives are all exactly the same color, while others seem to have a variety of hues. I am guessing that the olives that appear color cloned have probably been dyed. Is there any quick and dirty way to identify dyed olives?

[Raoul Duke]

In the development stages an olive goes from a yellow thru green thru red and on to black, with some being a bit of each. Grading olives for harvest uses color as a guide to insure consistency of ripeness, year to year.