/ 5 April 2013

Bring taste buds to life with an olive jamboree

Sweet and sour: Olive jam
Sweet and sour: Olive jam

I blame time spent in hillbilly country — Appalachia — for my hankering for the sweet-salt combination.

Skillet cornbread cooked in bacon grease, iced with honey or molasses. Salt-cured, hickory-smoked Virginia hams seasoned with brown sugar. Devils on horseback — dates stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. Potato chips in a peanut butter and honey sandwich (I know, I know).

So when I saw black olive jam at our local farmer’s market in Prince Albert the other day, I thought I could once again “put a little South in my mouth”.

It was great. But I wondered why it was so great — it’s not just me and the southern half of the United States who knows this.

Italians wrap their sweet summer melons in prosciutto; Spain devours Manchego cheese with quince paste; and Mexicans love strips of mango sprinkled with salt and a little chilli and lime juice.

Of course, those trusty food scientists are on to this phenomenon. We all know our taste buds’ cells awaken when introduced to sweet, salt, bitter, sour and that elusive umami, or savoury, flavour. But apparently these geeks with their wonderful jobs have isolated an additional receptor cell on the tongue that transports sugar into the cells only when salt is present.

They’ve also learned that salt makes things sweeter when acting as a bitterness suppressant.

So in my Karoo neck of the woods, where everyone with olive trees in their gardens knows that brining olives leeches out their bitterness, adding sugar had to be the inevitable next step.

Olive jam makes many things yummier. Eat it with goat cheese crostini or a wheel of brie, top a burger, glaze a meatball, stuff it under the chicken’s skin before roasting it or dab it on a sandwich.

Visit olivessa.co.za and kloovenburg.com for more