what you should know

Meaty, black and slightly sweet, the Kalamata is our favorite table olive.

Good flesh-to-pit ratio. Firm but slightly chewy. Strong and briny but without that mineral aftertaste left by so many olives. A perfect, plump nibble. Also great in tapenade.

Kalamata olives come from around Kalamata, Greece, a city at the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Kalamata is an earthquake-prone area that specializes in the production of olives, raisins and grandiose New Age music.

washed and soaked Almost all harvested Kalamata olives are kept whole for eating. (Only scarred and unshapely ones are used to make oil.) Kalamatas are washed, sometimes pitted, and then left in a red wine vinegar brine.

it's the pits We like to buy Kalamatas unpitted. The texture holds up better and is less prone to mushiness. Plus, pitting olives is good exercise.

what you need

In his Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit, Mort Rosenblum tracks the history and legend of the olive. This is one of the best culinary histories you'll read.

Though it's not really useful for anything else (except maybe displaying your collection of marbles), we're still suckers for this wooden olive canoe.

While OXO's cherry pitter can handle olives just as well, the easiest way to pit an olive is with your fist and a dough scraper.

what you do

In this simple dish of sliced mozzarella with green and black olive tapenade, the salty, umami olive spread plays off the clean, mild flavor of the mozzarella.

Speaking of tapenade, hogwash's pan-seared chicken with two-olive tapenade and sundried-tomato cream leaves you with enough left over for sandwiches.

For this simple spin-off of the classic baked Provençal tomatoes, we added Kalamatas, garlic and bread crumbs for extra flavor. (Cheese wouldn't hurt, either.)

A tuna, green bean and olive salad is not quite the classic Niçoise, but it's a solid jumping-off point for all kinds of variations.

This calamari, radicchio, white bean and Kalamata olive salad is a recreation of a salad Brys washed down with a cold beer on Naxos.

Featured recipe: This delicious flatbread El Greco comes from DC-area food blog Food Rockz and is the featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge.