Olive Oil Isn’t Just Olive Oil, And Here’s Why

Think olive oil is just olive oil? So did I, until I discovered just how much difference the right harvest, technique, and a few rather clever tricks can make.

I, like most regular people I’d wager, used to think olive oil was just olive oil. That was till one fine evening when I was sat down for dinner at the wonderful 8 1⁄2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Macau, when the waiter rattled off a list of the different kinds of olive oil they had and asked me which I would like for my bread. Clearly noticing my hesitance and probably bewilderment as well, he just said he’d get me a bit of everything. 

And so it was that I had five different bowls of olive oil laid out before me, and, in what was a markedly palate-expanding moment, found each of them to vary quite a bit from the others. That led me down the rabbit holes of how olive oil is not in fact just olive oil, and I’ll be sharing a little of what I found with you today.

Olive oil doesn’t age well

One of the first things I discovered down this particular rabbit hole is that olive oil is actually more akin to fresh fruit juice than it is to wine. We tend to think of bottles of the stuff as something that can sit happily in the cupboard for years, and some might even be tempted to think they get better with every passing birthday, but olive oil doesn’t really work like that. In fact, the fresher it is, generally speaking, the better.

So rather than trying to improve the oil by letting it sit around, some of the more interesting producers are finding ways to influence its flavour before it even makes it into the bottle, and this is where things start to get particularly interesting.

Pressing matters

One of the coolest examples is something called co-milling, or agrumato, which is essentially when you throw something other than olives into the mill together with your olives. And this isn’t one of those situations where you toss in a few dried chilli flakes or a sprig of rosemary and bam, you’ve just co-milled or whatever; what we’re talking about here is whole fresh ingredients being crushed alongside the olives themselves. Sicilian producers, for instance, might put fresh lemons, blood oranges, or chillies directly into the mill, allowing them to be crushed and processed alongside the fruit.

The difference it makes is a pretty significant one. Rather than simply infusing an already finished olive oil with another ingredient, co-milling incorporates those fresh flavours during the extraction process, which means the oils from the fruit and the olives are brought together from the very beginning. The result can be remarkably vivid, with the citrus, heat, or whatever else is being used feeling like an integral part of the oil as opposed to something that’s simply been added afterwards.

It’s also one of those techniques that sounds a bit more complicated than it actually is. Basically, what you’re doing is just crushing things together. It’s what you choose to crush, and when you do it, that makes all the difference.

Time will tell

Then there’s the rather fascinating question of when exactly you harvest the olives. Producers can take olives from the same grove, sometimes even the same trees, at different points in the season and end up with oils that taste worlds apart from one another, or at least about as different as olive oil can taste.

If you harvest them early, you tend to get something greener, grassier, more pungent, and with a more assertive slant to it courtesy of all those naturally occurring polyphenols. Leave them to ripen further, on the other hand, and the resulting oil generally becomes softer, fruitier, and more buttery, discarding some of that aggressive green character along its maturation.

Neither is necessarily better than the other; they’re simply different expressions of the same place at different moments in time. And that, I think, is what makes olive oil so interesting: it’s kind of like a snapshot of what that tree was like at that particular time.

So the next time you’re reaching for a bottle, take a second to consider what’s actually inside it. Where were those olives grown? When were they harvested? And what was done to them afterwards? Because, as I discovered over those five little bowls in Macau, the answer can make for a surprisingly different experience.

Opening image: Pixabay | Pexels