🫒 Meski

Meski is Tunisia's main table-olive cultivar. It comes from Manouba in the north of the country and today grows mostly in the north and in irrigated table-olive groves throughout Tunisia; a 2013 estimate put its share at about 60% of the area. Other names for it are Ktoubri and Octobri.

Table olives in Tunisia are a small sector next to oil: in 2009 they occupied 25,000 hectares, 9,500 of them irrigated, while the oil cultivar Chemlali covers almost 85% of the country's olive area. Nearly all table olives are eaten in Tunisia itself.

The fruit is large, symmetrical and medium purple when ripe. Buyers like it for its mild bitterness and for flesh that comes away easily from the stone; Meski is best suited to green olives. It is no good for oil: the fruit contains no more than 22% fat, and the oil has only about 55% oleic acid.

Meski pollinates itself poorly, so the French Picholine is planted alongside it. In a trial at Sidi Bouzid (2006–2015), the best yield came when pollinators made up 8% of the trees in the grove. The cultivar fears drought and salty water, so it grows only under irrigation, and on the humid coast it is attacked by peacock spot, the leaf disease also called peacock's eye. Yields are small and irregular, so since the 1990s breeders have been selecting better clones and hybrids.

On the shelf. Outside Tunisia, Meski mostly turns up as Tunisian green olives, and the cultivar is not always named on the jar. What gives it away is the large symmetrical fruit, the mild bitterness and a stone that parts easily from the flesh. No EU protected name involves Meski, and a search for “Meski olive oil” leads nowhere, since the cultivar is grown for the table.