The simplest way to make olives less salty is to soak them in plain water, changing the water at least once a day. Most olives reach a pleasant salt level within one to three days, though very briny olives can take up to a week. The process works through basic osmosis: salt migrates from the concentrated olive flesh into the surrounding fresh water until the two reach equilibrium, and each water change restarts that process.
Why Store-Bought Olives Are So Salty
Olives are cured and stored in salt or brine to preserve them and draw out their natural bitterness. The result is a lot of sodium. Green canned or bottled olives contain roughly 1,556 mg of sodium per 100 grams, while black ripe canned olives come in around 735 mg per 100 grams. For perspective, a small handful of about 10 olives weighs around 30 to 40 grams, so even a modest serving can deliver a significant chunk of your daily sodium. That salt is doing its job as a preservative, but it often overshoots what most people want in terms of taste.
The Cold Water Soak
This is the standard method and the one least likely to damage your olives. Place them in a bowl or food-grade container, cover them completely with cold water, and refrigerate. Swap out the water every 8 to 12 hours. Taste an olive each time you change the water. Most commercially brined olives will taste noticeably milder after 24 hours, and many people find the salt level just right after two to three days.
If you’re working with heavily salted olives, like dry-cured Moroccan or Greek varieties coated in coarse salt, expect the process to take longer, potentially a full week with daily water changes. Cutting a small slit in each olive or lightly crushing them speeds things up by giving salt more surface area to escape through. Pitted olives also desalt faster than whole ones for the same reason.
Keep the water cold. Research on olive desalting found that even at a controlled cool temperature (around 46°F / 8°C), the process causes some softening and slight browning. Green olives processed in lye (the most common style for green Spanish-type olives) lose the most firmness, up to 26% in some cases. Naturally cured olives hold their texture much better, losing only about 2%. Using cold water and not soaking longer than necessary helps minimize these changes.
A Faster Option: Warm Water
If you need results in hours rather than days, use lukewarm (not boiling) water. Warm water accelerates the movement of salt out of the olive flesh. Place the olives in a bowl, cover with warm tap water, and change it every 30 to 60 minutes. After two to four rounds, taste one. This approach works well when you’re prepping olives for a recipe that evening, but it will soften the olives more than a slow cold soak would. Avoid actually boiling olives. The heat turns them mushy and can make the skin split.
Bringing Flavor Back After Desalting
Soaking removes salt, but it also washes away some of the olive’s complexity. Desalted olives can taste flat. A quick marinade fixes this entirely and lets you customize the flavor.
Drain your soaked olives well and pat them dry, then toss them with olive oil and any combination of aromatics you like. Good starting points:
- Herbs: fresh rosemary, oregano, or thyme sprigs
- Citrus: strips of lemon or orange zest
- Heat: red pepper flakes or a sliced fresh chili
- Garlic: a few smashed cloves
- Acid: a splash of red or white wine vinegar to brighten the flavor
Let the olives sit in the marinade for at least a few hours at room temperature, or overnight in the fridge. The oil coats the flesh and carries the aromatics into it, giving you olives that taste intentional rather than just rinsed.
How to Store Desalted Olives
Once you remove olives from their original high-salt brine, their shelf life drops significantly. Salt is what was keeping bacteria at bay. Desalted olives stored in plain water should be refrigerated and eaten within about a week. Change the water every couple of days to keep them fresh.
If you’ve marinated them in olive oil, they’ll last two to three months in the fridge as long as the olives stay fully submerged. Use a clean utensil each time you pull some out, and top off with more oil if the level drops below the surface of the olives. Any olive exposed to air above the oil line can develop mold.
Matching the Method to the Olive
Not all olives respond the same way to desalting. Green olives cured with lye (like Manzanilla or Castelvetrano) are the most vulnerable to texture loss during soaking. Keep soak times shorter and check frequently. Kalamata olives, which are typically brine-cured in vinegar, hold up better but may need longer soaking because their brine is often quite concentrated. Dry salt-cured olives, wrinkled and intensely salty, benefit from the longest soaks and from slitting each olive before submerging.
A good rule of thumb: taste every time you change the water. Pull the olives out as soon as they hit a salt level you enjoy. You can always soak longer, but you can’t put the flavor back once it’s gone.