At a glance
Two bowls, for six
EasyOne pan, no technique to learn first.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 12 min
- Total
- 22 min
- Serves
- 6
Plus restingAt least two hours for the olives, and up to three days.
Everything on this site takes longer than this and almost nothing gets eaten faster. It is also the only recipe here that is genuinely better made in advance.
Infusing is not frying
The temptation with a pan of oil and aromatics is to hear something. Resist it. Above about 60C, rosemary turns medicinal, garlic starts to brown and go bitter, and the orange peel loses its top notes. Eight minutes on the lowest flame your hob will hold extracts the fat-soluble aromatics without cooking any of them.
If it sizzles, take it off, let it cool a little, and start again lower.
Orange peel, pared not zested
Cut strips with a knife or a peeler and check the backs for white pith, which is bitter. The oil in the coloured layer is what you want, and it is the ingredient that makes a bowl of supermarket olives taste like they came from somewhere.
Two hours minimum, three days better
The olives are already cured and salted; what the marinade does is displace some of that brine at the surface with flavoured oil, and that takes time. Two hours is noticeable. Overnight is much better. Three days is the point at which people ask where you bought them.
Room temperature throughout. The fridge is the enemy of this dish.
The almonds, and toasting them dry
Nuts toasted in oil from cold fry unevenly and the oil takes on a slightly stale note before the centres are done. Toasted dry, they roast from the inside, and the oil goes on at the end purely as a vehicle for the salt and paprika.
They should be warm when they reach the table. It is a small thing and it makes an ordinary bowl of nuts into something somebody comments on.
Ingredients
For the olives
For the almonds
Method
5 steps
Warm the olive oil gently
Put the oil, orange peel, garlic, fennel, chilli, and rosemary in a small pan over the lowest heat for eight minutes. It should never sizzle — you are infusing, not frying. It will smell finished before it looks it.
Pour it over the olives hot
Tip the olives into a bowl and pour the warm oil and everything in it over the top. Stir once and leave for at least two hours at room temperature.
Toast the almonds dry first
In a dry pan over a medium heat, toast the almonds for six to eight minutes, moving them constantly, until they are patchy gold and smell toasted. Only then add the oil.
Season off the heat
Off the heat, toss with the salt, paprika, and sugar. The residual oil is what makes it stick. Tip onto a plate to stop them cooking further.
Serve the almonds warm
Olives at room temperature, almonds still warm from the pan. That is the contrast worth arranging.
Cook's notes
- Olives with stones in taste better and slow people down, which is the point of something served with a drink.
- Never refrigerate marinated olives. Cold olive oil goes cloudy and solid and the olives taste of nothing until they warm back up.
- The quarter teaspoon of sugar on the almonds is not for sweetness — it helps the salt and paprika adhere and gives the surface a faint gloss.
- Keeps
- Olives, three days at room temperature in their oil, and they improve. Almonds, two days in a jar, but they are best in the first hour.
