Extra Virgin—it's a label that kids snicker at and adults rarely fully understand. What makes it even more challenging is that the definition is not always agreed upon and is certainly not universally regulated.
I've had olive oil on the brain for a while now. I was lucky enough to conduct olive oil tastings for two groups this year and recently finished Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller. One of the biggest things that stuck out to me from the book is that we have been combating adulterated or counterfeit olive oil for as long as we have been consuming it. In ancient Egypt and Greece, there were governmental entities charged with ensuring the purity of the olive oil consumers were getting. Now, a few millennia later, the adulterers have gotten much more sophisticated.
Olive oil in the absolute worst-case scenario is cut with cheaper oils not from olives, such as rapeseed or other seed and nut oils. This is a rare occurrence but has happened in modern history. More common is that producers are cutting good olive oil with refined oil—olive oil that has been chemically fixed. Either olives themselves have gone rancid, were of inferior quality, or the oil itself has gone rancid. Then, through a process of degumming, neutralization, bleaching, and finally deodorization, they clean or fix those bad oils and mix them back with some good extra virgin oil. Often the folks responsible for creating the chemical tests that determine if an oil meets the criteria to be called Extra Virgin (ensuring that the oil was never cooked or adulterated, just pressed and collected) are the same folks who are designing the process and technologies to clean a bad oil. In 2010, there was a fairly well-publicized study from California's UC Davis that found that several brands of prominent olive oil in the grocery store aisles failed to meet the criteria for extra virgin even though they had that label.
Another dimension of the challenges very good olive oil is facing is the transparency around sourcing. An alarming amount of the products worldwide that say "made in Italy" are not made in Italy. The idea of "made in Italy" may be the single most powerful culinary label in the consumer packaged food industry. Therefore, people will go to great lengths to use it. It is a common practice for oils to be produced or bottled in Italy while being grown in Spain.
So with all of this aside, what are we as consumers to do?
I believe that we need to shirk economies of scale and buy olive oil from human-scale companies. It is impossible for a multinational company to supply the entire world with their olive oil while holding things like "Extra Virgin" to its original intention, let alone being fully transparent around the sourcing of their product. Similar to what we see in chocolate, the giant companies are not able to offer that transparency, nor do they have any incentive to do so.
If we start treating olive oil like we do wine, I think we will get better results. What I mean by this is that I have little faith a "California Red Wine" is going to take my breath away. It seems like a bulk wine. A Sonoma Red starts to be more interesting. When you start talking about a Syrah from Benchland with Dry Creek in Sonoma, you have something that is very special. So in terms of olive oil, we should not put much hope in an olive oil that is identified as Spanish, Italian, or Greek only. Ideally, we want to know the province, if not the exact estate the olives were grown on. Then we can get something profound that is a true representation of a place and the people who produce it.
As large oil companies continue to flood the market with inferior oils at inexpensive prices, we are losing our knowledge of what good oil should be. If you taste the oil in your cupboard right now and it seems mild and pleasant, ask yourself: what should it taste like? Is this the flavor of that fruit, or is it the product of deodorization and blending? I would argue that we are not served by blending the world's oils into a mélange of mediocrity. Each oil, like each geography, should be celebrated for its distinct nature. We hope you will come by and taste the several different oils we choose to carry. See why they are all different, and hopefully we can help you understand why we carry so many.
Applications:
Mild oils are best for delicate items. Finishing a fish dish or drizzling on salads or grains that you don't want overpowered. Try oils from Canaan or Quinta do Paral in Portugal.
Middle-of-the-road olive oils are great if you only want to have one bottle in the pantry. These can be good for cooking, making vinaigrettes, as well as finishing dishes. Try our oils from Rustichella in Italy, the Hojiblanca from Regalis, or our Greek oil from Chania, Crete.
Bold oils are best for bold dishes or times you want the olive oil to be the star. When we make our olive oil cake, we use Mahjoub oil from Tunisia. If you are finishing a bold dish like a brandade, you want something that won't get totally lost. Try the Flaminio Fruttato from Umbria, Italy.
The Rind Olive Oil Cake
Ingredients:
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150g white sugar
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3g baking soda
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2g baking powder
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1g Diamond Crystal salt
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2 tsp lemon zest
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175g extra virgin olive oil (Mahjoub)
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110g buttermilk
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1 large egg
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165g cake flour
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60g marmalade
Instructions:
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Preheat oven to 325°F. Use a 9-inch cake pan and place lightly greased parchment paper in the bottom of the pan.
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Using a stand mixer, whisk sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together for about 2 minutes.
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Add lemon zest, EVOO, buttermilk, egg, and marmalade. Whisk vigorously until smooth and well emulsified.
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Sift flour into a separate bowl and then slowly add into the mixer set on medium speed until smooth and well combined. Scrape into the prepared pan. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the cake is firm but your finger can still leave an impression in the puffy crust.