Chinese Olives - The Surprising Truth Behind This Much Misunderstood Fruit.
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- Опубліковано 3 січ 2025
- Episode: 757 Chinese Olives
Species: Canarium album
Location: New York City, USA
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0:50-2:50 What are Chinese olives?
2:50-6:36 What do Chinese olives taste like?
6:36-10:50 Can you eat Chinese olive seeds?
10:50-11:33 Chinese salt olive review
11:33-12:38 Chinese olive juice review
12:38-15:25 What is Chinese olive vegetable and how to use it?
15:25-18:33 Cooked Chinese olive review
Mentioned in this video:
Dabai Fruit: ua-cam.com/video/FyyV8i5NiN8/v-deo.html
Pili Nuts: ua-cam.com/video/ZR4tsayI2I0/v-deo.html
Chinese Olive (2017): ua-cam.com/video/_v-3fY1yxHs/v-deo.html
Have you ever reviewed fruits of the genus Dacryodes?
It's a genus very similar to Canarium, the fruits are fatty and savory.
Fausto, I never heard of Dacryodes genus until today. But thank you, I will look it up.
Our fruit explorer friend is not what we could call fatty and savory. Maybe in a stew, if we cooked it enough. I wouldn't do that, because I like him. I would feel sorry about the whole situation. Plus, he already told us he is a vegetarian and who am I to break taboo? It would be a bad idea. I think we should just keep him and let him tell us about fruits. I like him.
As a boyfriend, he would be exhausting. But as Jared Rydelek, he is welcome anytime.
I went to the market and there was a big pile of mamoncillos. I don't know what to call them in English language. But he is so cute, I wonder what he would say. I am a big fan of his videos.
As a child growing up in China, I once found it confusing how a seasonal snack/pickle fruit was said to be so important in ancient Greek and Roman economies, until I learnt later that they are completely different species which are weirdly given the same common name 橄榄（gan lan) in mandarin. Also I just realized that I have to this day never eaten nor even seen any Chinese olive that is not pickled/salted.
Well now I see the commonality. Regular Olives are rarely if ever served unpickled.
Regular olive flesh is only edible after being pickled. Unpickled olives are very bitter
Anyway, you could write to Jared to give him interesting ideas. China is huge with lots of interesting produce
I used to buy candied olives in all sorts of flavors at dried fruit and herb vendors in Taiwan . I think they always just tasted like whatever they were flavored with. Good chewy texture though.
Same thing with Italian or Spanish olives , if they've not been minced and squeezed to extract th oil .
I love that you got both "pine" and "apple" from the fruit but "pineapple" from the juice. English is funny.
you just blew my mind
Pinecones were called pineapples at one time, and I think pineapples were called pineapples because they resemble a pinecone, and (this is speculation) they started to call pinecones pinecones to differentiate them from pineapples. Take all of that with a couple grains of salt.
@@Wario-The-Legend so....eat pineapples with salt?
During the construction of the Canal in Panama, a lot of Chinese Workers had these "Olives" on them. The seeds took and now grow in my areas around the city. I also struggled with the name since the locals call them "Ciruela", translating to "plum", and boy was I disappointed.
Do the locals eat the fruit?
Very interesting!
as a Chinese and I love this fruit, my way of eating it is chewing it like a gum, it will leave a very delicate sweet flavor in your mouth, so basically, for me, I love to eat it directly without any processing or cooking.
it is very refreshing.
on the other hand, only a few provinces of China have this fruit, so not many Chinese eat it fresh, most of them eat the snack version (dry one in the jar)
The Chinese word for this fruit (ganlan) came first. We then used this same name for the Mediterranean fruit. Originally the we call olives "western ganlan", but over time both become ganlan and most people don't know the difference anymore. There's also a third fruit, Elaeocarpus serratus, that we call Ceylon ganlan and gets confused with olives too.
Sri Lankan here, and I have had plenty of Elaeocarpus serratus. We call that olive in English too (I guess there's no English name for it and Europeans thought it looked like olives for some reason? There's a superficial visual similarity). It's not oily at all, more sweet and sour (depends on ripeness). Imagine my disappointment biting into an olive for the first time only to be hit with a mouthful of oil.
This is why scientific names are important lol
Reminds me of horse chestnuts, which most people think are just an inedible variety of chestnut, but in reality, they aren’t even closely related.
In Korea, the hanja word for Chinese olives was used to translate olives in the Bible. However we didn't even have Chinese olives - as a result, it's turned the other way around in Korea and the Chinese word for Chinese olives just means regular olives here!
ow, my head
akshually (🤓), in Chinese, the word for Chinese olives and regular olives are also the same.
Great to know!
With such a huge amount of research, travel and education on your channel, I'm surprised you don't have more subscribers. That blows my mind! You show stuff that I've never known existed and love learning through you vicariously. Thanks!
Great video!
Now that you've made a video about makrut lime / bergamot confusion and a video about European olive / Chinese olive confusion, consider also making a video about prickly pears (Opuntia stricta, the erect prickly pear, vs Opuntia ficus-indica, the 'regular' prickly pear). Some people (or myself and Adam Ragusea at least) had been confused why prickly pears don't taste as good as expected - turns out it's because most info on the internet is about Opuntia ficus-indica, but in fact there are many other Opuntias that look simiar but taste different.
Which one is the one they grow in Korea?
Had never heard of this ficus, onward to google I go
There's a very intricate carving of a boat made from one of the pits from this fruit. I saw it through a magnifying glass once.
Checkout "Ceylon olives" too. They look similar, eaten both raw and cooked. Unripe they're very tart, sweet and tart when ripe. seed/kernel is very similar to Chinese olive.
Will do!
I grew up with those olive vegatables in a jar. It’s also great to eat on its own as a side dish with porridge for breakfast. Awesome video! So interesting to learn about this fruit I’ve been eating my whole life without knowing
Aha! I didn't make that connection until you mentioned it, but I think I've seen this before by the congee at hotel buffets. I never tried it because I didn't know what it was 😅
Hi there, are u teochew nang? I have been eating this fruits with plain porridge in morning back in the 60's when I was a kid in Vietnam. We called the oh Nan in teochew language. They are imported from Hong Kong in a huge jar. But they were more elongated . That's why I always thought how come Chinese don't have any olive oil.😂😂😅
You grew up in a jar? :D
I think I used to eat these as a kid. They were pickled and we called them pickled football plums.
Thank you for this review. Rummaging around in a Chinese or Indian ethnic food market, especially the fruit and veg section, can be so much fun. Recently, I was able to buy some frozen fruit in a Chinese market, and finally taste yellow and red "jackfruit" (it wasn't jackfruit, I don't think) as well as Chinese hawthorn (the one originally used for making tanghulu) and durian, the latter of which blew my mind. As unpleasant, strongly rotten onion smelling the entire package was, as insanely delicious, some sort of amaretto-y custard-y tasting the fruit was, when I devoured it.
Thanks for clarifying something I always thought growing up. “This is not an olive!”
The olive vegetable is really good, but its use is not that complicated. It’s often consumed with either plane rice porridge, or fried along fried rice. Moms usually buy this with the other jars of preserved items in a supermarket aisle to have over porridge in the morning as the only thing they need to cook is porridge.
In India we usually pickle it or sundry and snack on it.
I had once searched about the chinese names for the western olives and the chinese olives , and what I found is , the western olives are technically referred as "oily olive" (油橄欖).
Another less common name of it is 齊墩果, which is a translation from the persian/arabic name of olive "zeytum/zaytum" (I have never heard about this name, only to find it in wiki).
Edit: made the explanation a bit longer.
pili nuts are native to where my dad is from! theyre from bicol and theyre absolutely DELICIOUS candied coated in thin caramel. i was addicted to them the whole month my dad took us when i was 10 lol
And this is why i subbed awhile ago.Very detailed videos. You truly dig down to what people like and dislike about different fruit and has helped my in making my small food Forest 😊
The flavor profile makes it sound like an interesting component in soups and stews.
I’ve been eating this as a preserved fruit (sweet snack) like in the packet you picked up and as a pickled shredded vegetable in oil (savoury condiment/food) eaten with rice porridge all my life and I never knew it was an entirely different thing!!! We call it ‘ga-na/ka-na’ (or ‘ga-na/ka-na chye’ for the pickled veg form) in my dialect.
Glad you made a video on this!!! Never knew their seeds were edible either (even if small). :O I’m curious to try breaking open a few the next time I eat some of the preserved fruit.
Maybe you could try roasting the seeds to see if it changes the flavor for the better? 🤔 With a touch of salt?
Soaking in baking soda would neutralize the sour and replace it with a saltiness.
i would argue that it's a bit misleading to say 橄欖 _gǎnlǎn_ literally translates to "olive."
橄欖 just meant 橄欖, and when Chinese people encountered olives they decided to also call them 橄欖 (only using Chinese characters here bc we're talking about a vast stretch of time and land so i have no idea what the spoken form would have been in the local language/dialect of the people who decided to transfer the name)
that being said, the word is allegedly a borrowing and the range of oiltrees (as in _Olea,_ the genus that olives are in) also extends through Asia and even into Australia so maaaaaaaybe whichever language came up with the original word initially used it for some form olive, but i suppose that's extremely hypothetical and for all intents and purposes we can assume that it was always use for fruits of species in the _Canarium_ genus.
It does literally translate to olive. More accurately to say the word LITERALLY MEANS the mediterranean olive in chinese, which is stupidly confusing to the chinese people, especially the majority of chinese people who live in the north and is just as unfamiliar with the chinese olive that grows only in the far south. This seems to be a common issue in chinese culture to completely mislabel foreign fruits the same name as a chinese one, not sure if it's a lack of creativity or difficulty with the pronunciation of foreign names, but dates, and papayas also come to mind., and in the case of papayas it has become so popular people no longer know the original chinese fruit by the name anymore.
Hearing the Soaking in Baking Soda Water reminds me of Old Recipes of Pickling European Olives in either Salt Water (Due to Modern Safety Standards) or Lye Water (More Classical/Ancient Method). Baking Soda making a Mild Salt when exposed to Hot Water; and Baking Powder having Milder Alkali then Lye.
There’s a cottage industry carving Chinese olive pits. The most renowned example is a boat carving from 1737.
I'm Chinese-American and have had the Chinese salt olives and seen the juice and all and it never occurred to me that they were not at all olives 😳
this fruit in Vietnamese we call it " Qua Tram' ". They come usually in green or dark purple/black (in my eyes :D). I have never tried them raw, only in salted (dried) or pickled.
There is another type of Chinese olive, black in color. Both arevery popular in Chaoshan region, the seeds was also eaten and used in the moon cake.
Dabai is actually in its native Sarawak, called Dah-beh, not Dah-by. Its also cured with salt into what is called Kundey/Kundeh/Kundei (Koon-deh) - which is eaten with white rice or used to season fried rice.
I live in Sarawak. We call it “Dabai” as is pronounced by him.
@@rubywee7391 you must be chinese. and if the "natives" (you are native too but you know what I mean) pronounce it as dabai I think it means they're adjusting to your "lingo"
You are correct. 😂I am Chinese and the Chinese call it Dabai😅
I'm from Sarawak, Borneo and grew up eating dabai whenever it comes in season. I never really noticed them getting confused as olives, both the chinese and western varieties eventho all 3 are called 'olives'. There's almost an unspoken rule that one has to mention which sort of olive or for which application when speaking about it? Chinese olives primarily refer to the ones pickled and eaten with congee, western olives refer to the fancy types you get in salads & pizzas whereas local dabai olives are just eaten as a local delicacy.
It's prepared much like how you mentioned, except that you shouldn't use hot/boiling water cause that will spoil the fruit. The water needs to be warm hot so the fruit softens enough to eat, then we marinate it with dark soy sauce and sugar before eating, delicious! Another fruit eaten in a similar way to dabai is engkalak, that looks like pink golf ball sized.. acorns? Mainly cause of the cap, but the fruit is otherwise smooth and not a nut at all. It's buttery and soft after soaking in warm water just like dabai. Man I miss the tropics, now that I'm in Australia =')
Love this! Thank you for sharing these descriptions. I feel more confident in expanding my horizons with foods.
Very informative video! As a Chinese living in the US, I never realized that the olives I had in China aren't the same thing as the western pickled olives. I just assumed that proper pickling will magically turn them into that soft texture while shrinking it in size without creating wrinkles
I had this preserved fruit from my grandma's store, they were being wrapped by 3 pieces, I had no idea what they were, but I love them. Growing up, i bought them and read on the package as olive😅 I never think further that it's different kind of olive. My favorite of this dried "olive" snack was the one which being treated with cloves
Chinese white olives (Canarium album) are different than Chinese black olives (Canarium pimela).
The Chinese white olives are usually used to make Chinese confectionery, whereas the Chinese black are usually salted and dry and are used for cooking.
Where I'm from, we often use a stone to crush/break open these gan lan, then marinate it in soy sauce overnight in the fridge. After that, just take it straight out of the soy sauce and put it in your mouth. DELICIOUS.
Finally someone is doing it!!!
I had been wondering what the "olives" are in that "oliver vegetable" for so many years.
Reminds me of Harreer Fruit (Terminalia chebula) from Pakistan, which is also prepared in the similar manner. i.e. boil it and preserve in sugar syrup before consuming. Mostly, used for medicinal purposes though.
I've got a jar of those in my cupboard that I haven't opened yet 😄. Are they typically eaten just as is or eaten with something?
@@WeirdExplorer.
@WeirdExplorer, it can be eaten as is.
But wait, the whole olive mystery does get deeper ... a subspecies of the "European" olive grows in Western China, it's the same subspecies as the "African" olive. It was used as a TCM instead of a "food".
Then you have the "native" olive which grows in Yunnan all the way through to Australia. I'm not aware that Chinese ever ate them, but the Aboriginals of Taiwan/Borneo/Australia all did.
I don't see long beans often. Grow them yourself. The greens go 10-14 feet so I bend them double over a 7' trellis but the reds are almost a bush at only 6 or so, semi vining upright. They have an open-ish canopy so interspaced succession planting works well. The yield is very good, as a dried bean they are like black-eyed. Being thin, the young pods dry well and fresh they require not much cooking. Pull the string out if ya need to. Overripe pods are sponge and slimey.
If you let them ripen until they become a bit grey and brown (spotty), you can put them in papaya salad as you're pounding before you put in the papaya, peels first then the rest whole. It's a great fruit raw and adds a lot to the dish! Very common in Laos and the Isaan region.
For the Chinese olive, you could cook and pickled it with salt and vinegar (some sugar too)
My botany teacher gave me a bottle of Pilli nuts during my internship. He taught me so much and helped me to enjoy botany even more! Ty Dr. Tucker for teaching me about trees and other plants along with the other Botany professors.
We used to get 3 of these dried ones wrapped in paper and twisted in a circle. Thry were delicious.
in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province, people actually eat these fresh without boiling or processing. just like you did when you bit into it at the beginning of the video. i actually like them that way. in the same area of guangdong you can also find them packed with ginger and salt and left for a week or so, also very nice.
you can also buy the juice freshly pressed and it's better than the version you drank here. i think both the fruit and the juice remind me of indian gooseberries
Better say homeland of Teochew people or just East Guangdong (some 汕尾 ppl also ate those ) . Chaoshan is some "new" concept. from PRC.
福建地区 把橄榄拍裂开，然后放酱油生吃，一般作为酒席前菜
Thailand has Thai olive (water olive) that is unrelated to European olive too. The European olive is called in Thailand by that fruit name (makok). It’s my fav fruit. Sour and crunchy.
So many different preparations of dried licorice plums at Vietnamese style groceries!
was also a popular snack in old Hong Kong.
It was a weird experience enough experience for me seeing you eat that black cooked olive and knowing it doesn't taste anything like what I would expect, so I can't imagine how odd it must have been for you! It's fascinating that not only do they look so similar from the outside but even the way the flesh is stuck against the stone on the inside.
The Chinese Olive is used in TCM, as a medicinal food use like condiments; it has tons of medicinal benefits (anti-inflammatory, anti-flu, lowers fevers, fights tumor, coughs, fights Heliobacter pylori, sore throat, detox poisoning) so NOT meant to eat a lot like fruits or vegetables but to ad pd in with others to be eatable,
This is a wonderful explanation. Your explanations were very nice.
It is used on the web site for one dish similar to the one you made: The Woks of Life
Chinese Olive is abundantly found in Northeast India where we make it into a pickle. However the raw hard ones are eaten as a salad as they're a bit sour and hard. However when it gets ripe the fruit becomes soft tender and tastes a bit sweet as well.
However to make it into a pickle with mustard seeds,Dry or green chilly,salt and mustard oil is the most relish pickle.
Chinese olives don't take time to dry as they're allergic to Sun and once plucked from the tree and kept exposed to sun it the texture and skin withered away like a flower.
Check this too: (Phyllanthus emblica), it's also called "olive"(滇橄榄, 油柑...) in my region(Yunnan, China). It has nothing to do with the European olive from the appearance but it tastes very very similar.
our family eats the olive vegetable with some rice porridge, it goes really well together
in south east China, we eat them raw with soy sauce. We crack them open first so the soy sauce gets inside the fruit. We pair them with plain congee.
The salted one's are more likely eaten as a snack.
We don't eat the seed inside.
Great explanations! Interestingly tho, the Chinese scientific name of the European olive is "木犀榄(mù xī lǎn)", which means "olive of Oleaceae". We also call it "油橄榄(yóu gǎn lǎn)", which basically means "oily olive". But actually many ppl in China don't know the difference
Wow that Pengsheng brand olive vege (lol actually it's a weird translation) is one of my childhood favorites when I felt like eating a big bowl of rice. Good to know it is not actually a similar species to other olives, and how silly that I never realized that.
It really amazes me how you can discern those mixed flavors.
They sound good, I've seen them at my local Asian grocery, but assumed they were just regular olives.
Hopefully they aren't a potential allergen because I could imagine people accidentally eating it thinking it was just olives.
Have you ever cooked or thought of cooking with unripe jackfruit or banana blossom as stands ins for meat or fish respectively (or such as artichoke hearts & hearts of palm for other seafood kinds), such as with the produce you explore with?
Dabai fruit is popular in Sarawak. Needs to be soaked in hot water to soften it. Then add salt. It has a buttery taste. Good as a snack or mixed in fried rice or pickled. All very tasty.
its one of my favorite fruits.
I want to see you do more videos on the dried fruits and stuff from that aisle in the Chinese store. I have a huge Chinese supermarket near me and I love going there and trying new stuff but I never know what to buy.
I'm always questioning what the hell those olives are at the dried goods shops.
We have olive fried rice that they use the leaves of those to cook.
There are no bloody olives in it which is extremely upsetting because I like olives and I cook my own olive fried rice with different sliced olives like Kalamata and Castelvetrano.
I have a weird feeling that this is that weird fruit I ate I'm kindergarten though. We called it a salt pear. Because nobody knew what it was and the kid who brought them I believe got them from his mother who was soaking them in saltwater
The ones in the packet isn’t really for eating stright up. Bu the ones you see cut into slices are edible stright up
The Chinese olive vegetable is definitely my favorite pickle. I purchased a jar online and tomorrow I'm also going to fry it with beans.
Besides I'm curious about the real flavor of Philippines purple yam ube. Can you make a video of it? I've got purple yam from Chinese market but it tastes doesn't like the internet description of ube at all. There's no vanilla hint. Instead it's earthy and a little like radish.
There is a slite different variaty called 白榄，it was one of the summer/ autum special fruit. And it's good for sore throat 😊
Olive vegetable and rice is such an easy tasty way to get a preserved veg fix.
That jar is great with plain Congee
You gotta come to Bicol if you ever return to the Philippines. So much pili nuts when in season, but so so expensive.
Hi i just realized after seeing your clip of dabai, it looks like the pili fruit of the Philippines - Canarium Ovatum. Have you already featured it? Must also be closely related to tthese olives.
You killed my curiosity on them lol.
Boiling in baking soda or sodium hydroxide would soften the fruit and neutralize bitter, sour and tart flavour compounds.
How do you not know about loving plum. Its a plum that loves you unlike those other plums that plots against you
ťřůę
But did you try ripening the 'olives', and/or getting some unripe dbai?
(In UK I have waited up to 76 days, just to get a supermarket 'ripe and ready' 'Angelino' plum ripe enough to eat! Usually they rot long before they get ripe.)
Bought one of these licorice olives from the asian supermarket after watching this. 😍😍 Always so thesebut never bought. It's delicious!! Definitely going in my regular dry pickled fruits
Omg I almost thought I clicked on a Bluejay video for a second.
The seed is used in the fillings of some traditional Chinese pastries, such as mooncakes.
I wonder if the baking soda soak kills the sour a bit while adding salt?
Could you please demystify, perhaps, why the dried 无花果 (fig) strips are constantly being labeled papaya? D: I still don't know what they actually are!
Lol the AtomicShrimp shopping opening
Pretty sure the black preserved version of these olives are more popular in cooking. They kind of look like black preserve garlic in texture.
I live in Asia and I must say cardamon is not really used in chinese cooking, but it's heavily used in Indian cooking. By adding 1 whole cardamon to the tofu-longbean-oliveleaf dish it's going to take on an Indian style flavor.
Black cardamom is pretty different than green cardamom though. Its more like tsao ko, which is a cardamom that is commonly used in China.
Never heard of those but the fried and pickled ones look quite tasty!
growing up from china, i never tried fresh chinese olive, maybe i did, just dont remember. but i m sure at least 99% of them are candied /salted olive.
i think traditional chinese medicine use chinese olive as somthing to "open ur appetite /speed up digestion after big meal" (at least thats what parents describe "our olive" to be )
The raw one looks, sounds and reminds me of green unripe walnuts. The taste has to be pretty different, though.
Muuuuum! We need olives for dinner.
No honey. We got olives at home.
The olives at home:
You should try other popular can or jar produce like preserved onion bulbs.
i love the preserved olive vegetables, theyre delicious straight out of the bottle on chinese buns or porridge
Where did you get the fresh fruit
Compare the black ones from the mustard green mix to Hallidiki olives and let us know
I SOOOOO appreciate the information and joy you bring me.
Love Laura
Thanks Laura!
Ahhh is this like jaboticaba as well? Or have I confused that one with dabai 😂 I haven’t tried either yet but they sound good!!
Can you help me find a fruit from my childhood? My uncle from Guatemala brought a jar of small green round fruit with a pit, I remember them being sweet. For the life of me I can't remember the name or find them anywhere online. He also bought them while in the US but I don't know where he got them.
As Chinese living Spain, I was confused olive oils, how it could be😂
Try adding a pat of butter after cooking.?
I want to try one! That is not an olive, not with us, but they look tasty.
I know dates and jujubes are different plants with the same Chinese name but never thought olives and Chinese ones are different.
Olives originated in Asian minor and introduce to the Greeks through present day Syria amd Anatolia, in some parts of central Asia they still have wild olives trees forests!
Oh wow. I live in China. I love that “olive sauce” - cook it through rice, it’s great.
I’ve always assumed it was made of olives. 😂
It's so good! I've been putting it on tofu strips
I was confused until now. Growing up I knew only chinese olives. I have always wonder if they are the same as the european/mediteranean olives.