Olive Oil

When I was a kid, I’d come home from school and make the same snack almost every day. Slice homemade bread, toast it, rub a clove of garlic on it, douse it with olive oil, and sprinkle some salt on it. Maybe a sliced tomato if it was the right time of year.

Bruschetta is the epitome of simple Italian cooking, and you can’t make something that has only three ingredients without great olive oil.

Unfortunately, most people’s experience with olive oil is something that is insipid at best and all too often rancid. I wouldn’t realize this was the norm until I was an adult.

Olive oil is one of the most adulterated food products on earth. It’s extraordinarily profitable to do so, and most consumers don’t know the difference because they’ve never been exposed to good, much less great olive oil.

A great olive oil, which is essentially a fresh juice product, should have bright green notes of grass, fruit, earth, a touch of bitterness or astringency, and at least a bit of a peppery finish.

It should not leave your mouth feeling greasy, and there should be no stale, muddy, vinegary, metallic, or woody flavors.

Great olive oil starts with fresh olives, picked early before they reach full yield but begin to decline in flavor, but the milling process is just as important as the raw material.

Gone are the days of “cold pressing.” The reality is, there is no such thing as cold pressing and the process of pressing introduces many sources of contamination that create defects in the oil.

Fortunately for olive oil lovers like us, oil milling has gone through a revolution in the past several decades. Modern milling implementations are ultra-clean stainless steel affairs which never induce temperatures over room temperature, and minimize or eliminate added water that can wash away volatile polyphenols and flavorants that make the oil delicious and healthful.

Skilled operators, like our friend Luigi Tega, control every variable of the milling process and have tweaked their “recipe” over time to achieve the ideal outcome.

There are as many varieties as there are sources of great olive oil. Find one you love from a producer you trust, and remember to pour it with the elbow held high.

You can buy olive oil from Luigi Tega (featured in the documentary) here.