My family loves olives. Well… at least I love olives. But I only like good olives, especially Kalamata olives. But the one thing that is always a turnoff is the whole spitting out of the pits. There really is no nice way to handle this unpleasantness.

So on a recent shopping trip, we picked up a little gadget that helps alleviate some of this problem. The OXO Olive & Cherry Pitter is a nifty looking little piece of engineered kitchen gadgetry.

When I tested it on some Kalamata olives it worked like a charm with a few shortcomings. One hassle is that you have to get the olive to line up in the holder. If you don’t do this, the plunger piece will not cleanly take out the pit. This took quite a bit of situating with some of the 10 or so olives I used. Another shortcoming is that the device doesn’t work with larger olives. I tried some large green olives and could not get the pit out with the gadget.

My daughters are huge fans of cherries, so we will be doing that testing very soon, but I anticipate it working about as well as it did with the olives.

Net-net, the device is pretty nifty, and if you are a kalamata olive fan, it may be worth the $12 purchase. But I am going to stick with the tried and true, albeit slightly unsophisticated, method of removing olive pits.