Crazy Food Club has a fan who is Greek. Recently, he’s been commenting that our articles are not ‘crazy’ enough for him. Well, coincidentally, I just had some olives from Greece, so here’s that crazy article for him.
Let’s get the base information out of the way first because it can get extremely confusing. Halkidiki is actually a nice touristic area in northern Greece. It has three peninsulas, which makes it look a bit like a trident pointing into the Aegean Sea. Halkidiki has a bit of an identity crisis, because in Greek, it starts with the Greek letter X (chi in Greek). Now, you can’t write it as Xalkidiki because nobody will know how to pronounce it! So they translated it to Chalkidiki. But it’s not pronounced is Chalk-ki-di-ki (as in chalk). Instead, it’s pronounced as Hal-ki-di-ki, where you pronounce the H as in the English H, but more from the throat and not the mouth. So some people will write it as Halkidiki, but the problem is that H in the Greek alphabet is eta, which is pronounced more like the English letter i. So the Greeks will end up pronouncing it as ee-al-ki-di-ki, whatever that is. Is that crazy enough?
Ok, enough of language lesson. Now for the taste.
These olives are big. No, they are not just big, they are huge! In fact, it’s so big that you can probably fit the whole of Halkidiki inside it! What about the taste? It tastes amazing, not just out of this world, but out of this galaxy! Unfortunately, because it’s been soaked in brine for some time, the crunchy texture is now quite soft. Now that’s sacrilegious! How can you destroy a perfectly great olive with some salted water? The whole of Greece will hate you, Tesco!
But all is not lost. That’s where the garlic comes in, because that crunchy garlic restores that crunchy texture to the whole thing. It’s like a trojan horse. On the outside, it it soft and green, quite friendly and can do no harm. But on the inside, it’s an amazing hard and crunchy garlic which has the strength of steel that will change the tide of the taste war.
It was an out of this world Greek experience. In fact, it’s more than that, it’s out of this galaxy! But hold on… it’s not totally Greek, isn’t it? Where did that garlic with the strength of steel come from?
Made in Greece (the olive). Bought from Singapore.
