I love making condiments that you can add to bread or enjoy with bread. As a baker, I have days when there is too much bread in the house. What better way is there to enjoy bread with some freshly made condiments! Tapenade is one such condiment I love to make when I also have some extra olives laying around. I normally buy a big bag of olives, because I love a good salad. But in the winters, salads are never nice when it is too cold. I thus had some olives that I could use for the tapenade. I also baked some fresh olive oil focaccia that goes so well with the fresh zesty and salty tapenade! Here is my own recipe, which is far away from the traditional one. But I make it using some of my homegrown produce. So please see the method and ingredients below, plus two videos about how I make the tapenade.

Recipe

A lot of the ingredients are from my garden and some are not. I think freshly picked flavours are superior, but we do not all have the luxury of a lemon tree in the yard. In a perfect world, I would have also grown the olives myself!

In any case, what you will need for this recipe:

• Olives
• Lemon juice and lemon zest
• Garlic
• Rosemary
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil

Method

The method is really simple! It involves mostly chopping. It thus depends on you how fine you will chop the ingredients. I like to do it by hand, but you can do it with any kitchen chopper or mincer. I also added two videos of how I chop the olives to make the tapenade.

I changed to a bigger chopping board, as the previous one was too small.

Here are two videos of how I chop. Using different methods make the job seem to go a little faster!

FInishing Touches

When you have the desired consistency of your olives and flavorings, add everything to a bowl. You can then add extra olive oil and some lemon juice. The lemon trees are heavy with lemons and I love the zesty flavor of lemon with olives. Mix well and maybe chill it a little so that the flavors infuse a bit. But it is essentially ready to be enjoyed!

Enjoy it any way you like!

I love this condiment with some freshly baked bread. I baked some lovely olive oil focaccia in the morning; and as lunch, we enjoyed it with this zesty and salty condiment. Please give this a try and enjoy it!