Italian fried stuffed olives without cheese
( Olive all'Ascolana senza formaggio)

No-cheese Ascolana olive recipe

Preparation and cooking

• - Clean and wash chives, pat dry with absorbent kitchen paper.
  Cut sausage, chicken and ham into pieces.
  Heat 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil in a pan and add chicken, sausage, and ham.
  Cook all meat, stirring frequently, some minutes.
  Pour in wine, season to taste with salt and pepper and continue cooking on a low heat, half-covered, until your meat is tender and cooking juice is well reduced. Stir now and then.
  Just before turning off the stove, cut in chives.
• - Let all meat cool.
• - Meanwhile ...
  ... prepare olives. Remove the pits with a sharp knife, making a spiral cut from top to bottom without breaking them. It is not very simple to make a spiral cut. So you could halve your olives to rimove their pits.
  Now your olives are ready to be filled with meat mixture.
  This is a delicate step and you need a lot of time if it's the first time.
• - Puree all cooked meat together with an egg, nutmeg, lemon zest and crustless bread in a food blender. You must have a very firm filling. If you compare this recipe with the authentic version for fried olives, you can notice I changed the amount of meat and there is no more grated Parmesan and Pecorino cheese. This involves very different calories.
• - Take a bit of the filling and give it the shape of an olive, by using the palms of your hands. Put the olive you’ve cut before around it and press lightly. Continue until all your ingredients are used up. Dip every olive in all-purpose flour, then in remaining egg (lightly beaten) and at last in plain breadcrumbs.
• - Heat abundant olive oil in a pan and fry your olives until golden on all their sides. Remove them from the pan with a skimming ladle and put on absorbent kitchen paper to remove the fat in excess.

Just before serving

• - Serve your fried stuffed olivs warm or cold.

Note

Tips

• - This is a very useful ahead recipe. In fact you can prepare them some hours ahead. They are good hot and cold.
• - You can prepare your stuffed olives in advance (dip them in plain breadcrumbs and put apart) and fry them at last minute if you prefer to serve them hot.
• - Another tip of mine. I prepare a lot of stuffed olives and freeze them without frying. Read more details in the page dedicated to Ascolana olives.
• - To oven-fry stuffed olives, follow my step-by-step description. Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Bread your stuffed olives. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and brush it with 2 teaspoons olive oil. Arrange your breaded olives, separated from each other, on the baking sheet. Bake at an intermediate height. After about ten minutes, turn over your olives. Bake for another 5 to 10 minutes. Difficult to be more precise because a lot depends on your oven. Your olives will be ready when golden brown. Once removed from the oven, you can still spray them with olive oil. I always have a spray bottle full of olive oil that helps me a lot to dose it better.
• - If you want a much lighter recipe, bread stuffed olives only with plain breadcrumbs.

Menu planning

• - Consider 4 portions if you serve these fried stuffed olives as main dish. On the contrary they serve much more people.
• - When and how to serve these Ascolana olives without cheese?
  Think of them as TV snacks (finger food) in a very special occasion!
  Prepare them for your Italian aperitivo (happy hour).
  They are perfect in a meal, buffet-style or in any party menu. Keep in mind that people intolerant to cheese are increasing. When you have guests, you should also think of this ;))

Useful links for this recipe

• - Here's the link for the authentic Ascolana olive recipe!

Healthy eating

• - I calculated the calories of my stuffed olives without cheese without regard to the frying. So the values ​​ you can read in the nutrition facts work well for oven-fried olives where I considered only 3 tablespoons of olive oil (1 1/2 for cooking meat and 1 1/2 for cooking in the oven). On the contrary, if you want to fry them, you have to consider that this method of cooking increases calories a lot : about 100 kcal per 100 g of fried product. And fat too, obviously!
• - If you compare calories, protein and fat of my own version with the traditional recipe for stuffed olives, you will definitely notice that it is more advantageous. But this is not only linked to the absence of cheese. The composition of the filling was studied in a different way to have a low-fat and low-calorie recipe.
• - Fiber per serving: 3.2 grams

Loretta

What's the right wine for " Italian fried stuffed olives without cheese "?

We suggest you the same pairing for Ascolana olives, that is Rosso Piceno (a red wine from Marche-Italy).