How to Make Tapenade, a Mediterranean-Diet Basic

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By smittie53
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Good homemade tapenade is, like good homemade everything else, is so much better than the gourmet-shop variety, and it is as inexpensive as it is easy to make -- unlike, say, rose-hip jam. These two feature just might help to explain why it is standard fare in cheap and chi-chi Provence restaurants alike.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

A mortar and pestle, a cup of Mediterranean-style black olives, 3 tablespoons capers, 6 anchovies, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, a lemon, olive oil (optional).

Step 1

First, slice open the olives and remove their pits. Now you've got most of the hard work behind you.
Step 2

Crush the capers in the mortar. Add the garlic, and keep on crushing. Set aside this caper-garlic blend.
Step 3

Put the olives in the mortar, and apply the pestle. Add the anchovies, and keep on applying the pestle.
Step 4

Put the caper-garlic blend in the mortar, and blend well with the olives and anchovies.
Step 5

Add lemon juice and olive oil to taste. Use a fork to further blend all the ingredients.
Step 6

Serve with rounds of fresh French-bread toast brushed with olive oil, and any wine you like so long as it's a crisp well-chilled Mediterranean-born-and-bred rosé.

Tips & Warnings

You don't really need a real mortar and pestle. A Pyrex bowl and a sturdy standard stainless-steel knife, fork, and spoon will do. If salt is a taste concern and/or sodium a health one, discard the anchovy oil, rinse the anchovies, and compensate with virgin olive oil, unsullied by salacious salt. If some like it salty and some not, offer lemon wedges; lemon cuts the taste of salt. Put a carafe of olive oil on the table, so that yours guests can custom-season their own servings, as well; and also a salt cellar, for those of them who like to live dangerously.
Don't even think of using a blender unless you are preparing tapenade in bulk and the blender is capable of producing something that looks and tastes like it was made with a mortar, a pestle, and a little elbow grease.