Tapenade (Pounded Olive, Caper and Anchovy Paste)

Variations

• Tapenade verte: made with green olives. Less bitter, sharper, paler, and often bulked with a handful of almonds to hold it together.
• Without anchovy: the name comes from the caper, so it is still tapenade. Push the capers up to about 60g to make up the savour.
• With roast pepper or a dried fig: sweetness shifts where the bitterness sits.
• As a crust on fish: spread thickly on cod or salmon and baked, it puts oil and seasoning into a lean fillet at once. A standard Provençal use.
• Beaten into butter: equal weights of soft butter give you something spreadable, and half the salt.

Tips

• An olive off the tree cannot be eaten, and this dish stands on that fact. A raw olive is loaded with oleuropein, which is bitter past the point of being food. So every edible olive has been de-bittered, and which route was used has already decided its flavour, its salt and its texture before you open the jar.
• There are broadly four routes. Lye, rinsed out afterwards, is the fast Spanish way: mild and firm. Brine fermentation takes months and brings lactic fermentation with it, so the flavour is complex and the flesh softer (fermentation). Water curing, changed repeatedly, is the mildest and least salty. Dry salt draws the water out, leaving a wrinkled olive with the most concentrated taste. This dish wants one of the last two.
• So the seasoning of this dish was finished at the shop. Taramasalata wrote the structure down first: its roe spent weeks in salt, so "the adjustment only runs one way: too salty is corrected with more bread and oil, never with less salt". Tapenade goes one step further — there is nothing to dilute it with. Add more oil and at some point it stops being a paste and becomes a dressing. The dials left are which olive you buy and how long you soak it at step one (salt and seasoning).
• One clove of garlic is the only fresh thing in the bowl. The olives are cured, the capers are pickled flower buds, the anchovies have been months in salt. Budae-jjigae records the same shape from a different cause — "Every solid in this pot had its salt decided in a factory, so the whole recipe is built around an amount that cannot be lowered." There a factory decided it and here a cure did, but the conclusion is the same: the recipe is built around an amount of salt that cannot be brought down.
• The mortar is not nostalgia; there is a flavour reason. Taramasalata writes it out — "A hard blender blade bursts the olive oil's polyphenols and the bitterness comes forward." Tapenade already sits at the bitter end, so that one step is fatal. A spinning blade also emulsifies the oil into the water and turns the whole thing into a smooth cream, which is exactly the texture this is not.
• The good oil goes on top, after the pounding. The aroma of a fine extra-virgin is fragile, and its polyphenols burst under the pestle. Build with a mild oil and pour the good one over (cooking oils).
• The name is the caper, not the olive. Tapeno is Provençal for a caper. The olives are most of the weight; the fifty grams took the name.
• Serve it at room temperature. Straight from the fridge the olive oil has set, so it arrives as a greasy lump and the smell is shut. Half an hour out makes it a different dish.