What Tapenade Really Is

Tapenade is a Provençal spread, and one of the most useful things you can keep in the fridge. At heart it is three ingredients — olives, capers and anchovies — pounded with enough olive oil to bring them together. Everything else is seasoning. The name comes from the Provençal word for capers, tapenas, which is worth remembering: the capers are not a garnish but half the point, their sharp saltiness stopping a bowl of blitzed olives tasting flat.

It is also not a purée. A good tapenade keeps a little texture, so it sits on toast rather than soaking in. If you have only eaten the smooth paste sold in small jars, you have been missing something. Homemade is brighter, looser and far more savoury, and it takes about ten minutes.

The Ingredients That Matter

You need very little, so buy the best of each. This is not a recipe where cheap substitutions hide.

• Olives: 200g pitted black olives. Niçoise are traditional, but Kalamata or any good oily black olive works. Skip the bland sliced olives sold for pizzas. If you pit them yourself, count them in and out — a stray stone will chip a tooth.
• Capers: 2 tablespoons, rinsed. Brined are fine; salt-packed are better if you can find them, but rinse thoroughly.
• Anchovies: 4 to 6 fillets in olive oil. They will not make it taste fishy, just deeply savoury.
• Olive oil: 4 to 6 tablespoons of extra virgin. Use one you like, but not your peppiest bottle — bitterness gets louder when you blend.
• Garlic: one small clove, no more at the start.
• Lemon: a squeeze of juice, added at the end.

Making It, Step by Step

A mortar and pestle gives the best texture, but a small food processor is fine and much faster. Either way, go gently and stop before it turns smooth.

Crush the garlic with a pinch of salt to a paste. Work in the anchovies until they disappear. Add the capers and pound or pulse briefly, then the olives, in short bursts, scraping down the sides.

Add the oil a tablespoon at a time until you have a loose, spoonable paste — thick enough to mound on bread, soft enough to drizzle. It thickens as it sits, so err on the wet side. Finish with lemon juice, black pepper and a taste.

With a processor, the danger is over-processing: olives are mostly fat, and long blitzing turns them dull, oily and faintly bitter. Six to eight short pulses should do it.

Balancing Lemon, Garlic and Salt

The recipe is a starting point, not a rule. Taste and adjust.

• Flat? Add lemon juice, a few drops at a time. Acid is usually the answer, not salt.
• Harsh or bitter? Add another anchovy and a little oil. Anchovies round off sharp edges remarkably well.
• Too garlicky? Remember that raw garlic strengthens overnight. Make it milder than you think you want.
• Too salty? Add more olives and oil. There is no undoing salt, so only add it at the very end, if at all.

Ways to Use It

Toast first: sourdough, well toasted, rubbed with a cut clove of garlic, then a generous spoonful of tapenade and a halved cherry tomato or a soft-boiled egg. From there it goes anywhere a punch of salty savouriness helps.

• Loosened with pasta cooking water, it becomes an instant sauce for short pasta.
• Spooned over roasted peppers, courgettes or aubergine straight from the oven.
• Stirred into mayonnaise or thick yoghurt for a dip or sandwich spread.
• Spread over lamb or chicken before roasting, or dabbed onto white fish before grilling.

Keeping It, and Making It Your Own

Keep it in a clean jar, pressed down with a thin layer of oil on top to keep the air out. It lasts two to three weeks in the fridge, though the garlic sharpens over the first day or two. Bring it to room temperature before serving — cold tapenade tastes muted and oily. Any excess freezes well in an ice cube tray, roughly one cube per serving of pasta.

Once the basic version is sorted, vary it: a spoonful of chopped sun-dried tomatoes, a few toasted almonds, finely chopped rosemary, a pinch of dried chilli. Green olives make a sharper, more rustic version and are worth trying. What you should not do is complicate it. The pleasure of tapenade is that it tastes of three strong things done well, under a good bottle of olive oil.