Warm Marinated Olives With Orange and Fennel Seeds

1. Drain the olives in a sieve for a full minute and shake them dry. Wet olives spit in oil.
2. Take two strips of peel off an orange with a vegetable peeler, then scrape any white pith off the back of each strip with a small knife. The pith is where the bitterness is.
3. Crush the fennel seeds lightly, under the flat of a knife or in a mortar. Whole seeds stay hard and taste raw; ground to powder they turn muddy.
4. Pour the olive oil into a small pan and set it over the lowest heat you have.
5. Add the fennel seeds, the squashed garlic, the bay leaf and the chilli and leave them for 2 minutes. You are looking for one lazy bubble rising off the garlic, not a sizzle.
6. Add the orange peel and give it another minute, until the oil smells of orange from across the kitchen.
7. Tip in the drained olives and turn them through the oil. Warm them for 5 minutes, moving them twice, no more than that.
8. Take the pan off the heat before any olive starts to wrinkle. Wrinkled olives have gone past warm and into cooked, and cooked olives are tough.
9. Let the pan stand for 10 minutes off the heat. The oil keeps working while it cools, and this is where most of the flavour actually arrives.
10. Tip everything into a bowl, oil and aromatics included, and put it out with bread or seed crisps and an empty bowl for the stones.

Warm, not hot, and why it matters

An olive is a cured fruit, not a raw one, so it does not need cooking. Heat is only there to loosen the oils in the fennel, the garlic and the orange peel and carry them into the olive oil, which happens well below a simmer. Push the pan harder and two things go wrong at once: the olive flesh tightens and turns rubbery, and a good extra virgin oil loses the grassy, peppery character you paid for. The visual test is the olives themselves. Glossy and plump is right. The first wrinkle means the heat went too far.

Questions we get asked

Should marinated olives be served warm or cold?

Warm, if you have the eight minutes. Cold olives out of the fridge taste mostly of salt, because the fats that carry the fruit and herb flavours are stiff and release very little aroma. Ten minutes of gentle heat changes that completely, and the effect lasts for about an hour on the table. If you have made them ahead, take them out of the fridge early and warm the bowl rather than reheating the pan.

How long do marinated olives keep?

Two weeks in the fridge in a jar, as long as the olives stay covered by the oil. One caution about the garlic: garlic sitting in oil must be kept refrigerated and is best used within a few days, so if you are keeping them longer than that, fish the cloves out before the jar goes away. The oil will set cloudy and solid in the fridge, which is normal for a good olive oil and reverses at room temperature.

Can you reuse the marinating oil?

Yes, and it is the best part of the recipe. Strain it once the olives are gone and you have an orange, fennel and chilli oil for almost nothing. Use it on bread, whisk it into a dressing, pour it over a bowl of white beans, or start a tomato sauce with it. Keep it in the fridge if the garlic is still in there, and use it within the week.

Where this fits on the table

This is the first thing out and the easiest to hand round, because it needs no plate. Put fig and olive seed crisps at $6.95 next to it, and if you are working out how many small things a room actually needs, our guide to Christmas finger food does the arithmetic. For the same olives in a different form, what tapenade is and what to do with it sets out the four styles.

Kangaroo Island olives are $7.95 to $8.95 a pouch and sit with the rest of our olives and olives and olive oil ranges, along with the festive entertaining essentials they usually turn up beside. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post.