About olives and oil - a long conspiracy theory :D

We now have a small olive grove. It's probably been under bad care for decades, but it's still there!

How to get good olive oil from olives? My theory is that by patiently waiting for the olives to ripen, i.e. the color darkens, by being ready to act and harvest when the olives are at the optimal stage, pressing the crop with an old-fashioned basket press, collecting the olives by hand gently and time-consuming, then pressing the oil from them immediately after harvesting. All this is contrary to many so-called expert advice in modern times.

Why would I act old-fashioned and uneconomical?

There is a small olive mill near Grasse where part of the olive harvest is pressed with a rare old-fashioned basket press. We also sold this oil in La Petite Provence for a while a few years ago. The price was high, but for a reason. We went to choose the best oil ourselves. The oil was soft, mild and sweet, a small layer of sediment remained at the bottom of the can.

This oil mill was an eye opener for me! Little by little, the harsh truth about the marketing and economics of olive oils has started to reveal itself to me - or so I think :D

The traditional basket press, which is partially used in this old-fashioned mill, does not press the olives as thoroughly as modern electric presses or centrifugal machines, etc. modern bulls. Due to the weaker pressing force, only ripe, i.e. black, olives that have been delivered to the press almost directly from harvest can be successfully pressed with a traditional press.

Although ripe olives contain more oil than raw ones, by pressing with a basket press, the producer gets less oil from the olives than he would with the modern method. He also has to collect the ripe olives with special tenderness, because black olives, i.e. ripe and softer than raw olives, are sensitive to damage and thus very soon become unsuitable for pressing oil. Such olives must also be pressed into an olive mill at the same time, as black olives are more sensitive to deterioration from a long waiting time than raw green olives. For the same reason, ripe olives cannot be collected with the same care with all kinds of collection tools or by briskly swinging trees and dropping olives, but they must be collected almost entirely by hand. This is time consuming.

This is how laboriously olives were collected and pressed before more efficient electric ways were invented to collect raw olives with the help of tools and to squeeze the oils from raw, naturally less oily olives with super efficient machines.

Hard and green raw olives withstand the most brutal picking process and, thanks to the mechanization, produce more oil than black olives processed by traditional methods with old presses. But! The taste of olive oil pressed from raw and possibly longer pressed olives no longer corresponds to traditional soft olive oil. It becomes bitter and acidic. Bad.

Traditional olive oil has had a soft and mild taste. Its durability after pressing is shorter than oil pressed from raw olives. Modern oil pressed from raw olives burns dry in the throat, has off-flavors and also leaves a nasty aftertaste in the mouth. It also interferes with the taste of the food by introducing into it flavors that are very difficult to match with any other taste, which punch through almost the flavors of the food.

Modern producers of olive oil praise the health effects, taste and color of oil pressed from raw olives over the mild and soft properties of oil pressed from black ripe olives. The contribution of antioxidants is emphasized at the expense of taste. We have to come up with reasons for producing worse-tasting oil just because it is more efficient and productive. A few of the producers still dare to claim that producing oil from green olives would be more unproductive and therefore more expensive (and presumably therefore nobler) than from ripe black ones.

Another thing to note is that since raw olives produce bitter oil in any case, a possible longer waiting time for pressing is not so bad, because immediately after harvesting the olives start to ferment and a bitter aftertaste is formed due to the fermentation process. The fermentation of large batches of olives is so intense that even the temperature of the olive pomace waiting to be pressed threatens to rise above the temperature limits of the production methods allowed for extra virgin olive oil! What does this do to the taste of the oil!

A little - that is, a LITTLE - bitterness comes into all the oil, because there are always some olive tree leaves and raw olives left in the mix. (Incidentally, the leaves of the olive tree are said to contain super-beneficial substances, but there are more of them)

In the tiny olive mill I mentioned here, it is produced with both a traditional press and an electric press. They make different oils from olives of different degrees of maturity and use different olive presses for different oils. It is very enlightening to be able to taste the taste differences created in this way between different presses and degrees of maturity.

Why then does no one stand up against this triumph of green raw olives? First of all, it has been going on for so long that not many people have been able to taste traditional olive oil and its sweet neutral and soft taste. Secondly, almost every olive farmer and miller has realized how much wealth can be gained by believing that this new oil is even better. This way you can access bigger profits with less work and risk. If once the public has been made to buy bad oil, why quickly stop the flow of money flowing into your own pocket and cut off your own branch!

Unfortunately, even those who press with the old methods usually get most or part of their income from the more "modern" more profitable olive oils. That's why it's wisest for them to keep their mouths shut. Quite understandable.

Studies have been conducted on the health effects of oil pressed from raw olives. I'm not going to dispute them or the health effects of antioxidants here, I'm talking about matters of taste and traditions. About how we have been brainwashed into thinking that that liquid is "real" traditional olive oil.

I don't like to add bad-tasting bitter flavors to any of my food! Not for salad - at least enjoy the dry and coughing taste of raw olive oil in your throat with food! - I don't want it in sauces, not in meat, not in anything! (I'd be interested to know what kind of food COULD go with that kind of bitterness!)

This abundant use of raw olives is, in my opinion, a wild world-class fraud, which you might notice if you ever get to taste the downy oil pressed from ripe, gently picked and traditionally processed olives - and if you think a little about what modern highly productive picking techniques, pressing and preservation have demanded of olives and their degree of rawness . I think this is pretty clear when you get into it.

And that's not all. Almost only filtered olive oil is sold to us, even if the unfiltered one has a better taste - once again! Clear, i.e. strained, and thus worse tasting olive oil lasts longer on the store shelf. That's it.

Some olive oils are mixed with milder oils, either openly or secretly. They say this is how consumers are cheated. Sunflower, rape etc. is more affordable and at the same time the otherwise bitter-tasting base oil is balanced by the milder-tasting oils. This may be one of the reasons why mild-tasting oils are frowned upon by consumers. It is thought to be a sign of poor quality. Bitterness when the only reliable means of evaluation tells us that there is only olive in the oil, they think. The truth is different.

You can like modern oil. There's nothing wrong with that, but when it is claimed that it is the only correct one, or even that traditional oil is of poor quality, the argument goes to the side of slander. I'm against that. And I'm against lying. Otherwise, just let all the flowers bloom! A matter of taste.

This is hardly the whole truth, but something like this reeks to my nose.

That bridge. So we know what we are aiming for, at least in our olive garden.

Now then, we should know how to cut the olive trees of our mini-sized olive garden, spray them, we should get a decent harvest from our olives, then know how to pick the small berries at the right time and get the pressing time within 24 hours from a traditional basket press (can we have time for such a mini-sized batches or at all?) and bottle our lovely liquid gold as the substance deserves .

Little thing :D We'll see how this goes, since we're novices. It might take a year or two before we get to the press...