2012 | No. 89

Olive Oil
Taste During the Harvest to Understand the Differences

 

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

In mid-October the olives on my trees here in Tuscany should have been showing signs of color and starting to swell with oil. But two harvests ago, throughout the Mediterranean, the fall had been unseasonably warm and in October the hard green fruits were still exactly that  — hard and green, with no sign of the plump richness, the delicate streaks of violet that indicate approaching harvest time. While growers in southern Italy were already spreading nets under their trees, olive farmers in Tuscany were shaking their heads at such an early date.

In Andalucía, where I had spent two weeks in September, it was the same story: for olives to start developing fat, in the process called lipogenesis, “You need a period of 10 degrees centigrade [50 degrees F] a couple of hours every day,” said Paco Vañó, who makes Castillo de Canena’s prize-winning oils. (A Castillo de Canena oil took the gold medal at the Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C., in June  — the first time a Spanish oil has ever been so recognized.) “And here,” Vañó continued, “it’s still summer weather. Strange times.”

Not only hot summer temperatures but an ongoing drought kept necessary moisture away from the olive groves. For four months there was no rain in Andalucía, where 30 to 40 percent of the world’s olive oil is produced. Autumn rains, Vañó said, along with cool temperatures are what promote lipogenesis.

He raises a number of olive varieties on his 1,500 hectares (3,750 acres) northeast of Jaen in the heartland of Spanish olive production. His 275,000 trees include the Andalucian workhorse Picual as well as Arbequina, an olive associated with Catalonia but increasingly planted elsewhere in the world, and Royal, a historic Andalucian olive that Vañó’s family has helped to restore. Vañó also maintains a large experimental plot of cultivars from all over Spain and much of the rest of the Mediterranean. Since he gave up international banking to join his sister in running the family olive business, he has devoted most of his waking hours to studying, learning, promoting, sifting, sniffing, tasting, and otherwise immersing himself in the complex world of olives and olive oil.

I, on the other hand, on my couple of hectares in the hill country between Tuscany and Umbria, raise mostly Leccino olives, with a few graceful Pendolinos as necessary pollinators. I came to olive oil in a totally unscientific manner, looking for a crop that would be sufficiently valuable to induce my farming neighbor to keep the terraces around our farmhouse clear of brush. Why Leccino? Because my consultant, Maurizio Castelli (a name to reckon with in olive production in Tuscany as well as in California and New Zealand), recommended the variety for its resistance to the cold winters we suffer here at around 700 meters (2,000 feet). Our approach has been completely casual  — we prune in March, if we are in Tuscany then; we harvest some time in November, depending on when we can get together enough hands. Our oil is pretty good, and we are, understandably I think, proud of it. But it will never win first prize at a Fancy Food Show.

The source of the difference between our oil and Vañó’s? A lot of it can be explained by the more rigorous approach taken by him and any number of top commercial producers in Italy, Spain, Greece, or even Tunisia. But the variety also contributes to the difference. Leccino on its own makes a soft, sweet, fruity oil without a great deal of staying power, so most Tuscan producers blend it with three other local cultivars: Frantoio, Pendolino, and Moraiolo. “Blend” is the wrong word, however, since it implies careful tasters sipping a little of this, a little of that, and cautiously adding them together. No  — in Tuscany, those olives, and a number of others that are more obscure, grow side by side in the groves as they have done for several centuries, if not much, much longer. What determines a particular producer’s blend is what has been growing historically in his or her oliveto. Some years the Moraiolo is more prolific and prominent in the oil, and other years it’s one of the others. Moraiolo and Frantoio make strong oils with lots of polyphenols, while weaker Leccino lends its sweetness. Pendolino mostly helps to pollinate and, as far as I can tell, adds little to the oil.

Those polyphenols are important. They give the oil structure and flavor, as well as color. And that flavor and color, as well as texture, can be used to great effect in all sorts of ways by an imaginative chef, in everything from simple salad dressings to emulsified sauces to elaborate garnishes  — or the “olive oil caviar” developed by Ferran Adrià. Not coincidentally, these same polyphenols contribute mightily to the healthfulness of olive oil.

When the Mediterranean diet was first promoted in the 1990s, olive oil was considered important because, as a primarily monounsaturated fat, it has a beneficial effect on cholesterol. From this perspective, extra virgin olive oil (unrefined and free of all but the merest trace of rancidity) and plain olive oil (refined from oil that fails to make the extra virgin grade) are equally good sources of the valuable fat. But the polyphenols in extra virgin function as powerful antioxidants, protecting us from oxidative stress, and moreover protecting the oil itself and giving it greater shelf life. An oil that’s high in polyphenols does not go rancid so quickly nor fade away quite so readily as one that is not. The polyphenols exist only in extra virgin olive oil. Refining destroys most of the polyphenols in regular olive oil.

In general, it’s the polyphenols that give the bitterness and pungency that characterize fine, fresh, high-quality oils. One of those polyphenols, oleocanthal, produces the throat-catching, cough-inducing element familiar to tasters of very fresh olive oil, and it has been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects similar to those of ibuprofen. The quantity of polyphenols varies from variety to variety  — Spanish Picual has one of the highest, along with Koroneiki from Greece and Coratina from southern Italy’s Puglia region. And with any variety, young olives  — ones that are harvested when not completely ripe  — have more polyphenols than fully ripened black ones. Farmers, by controlling irrigation and other factors, can often produce a greater or lesser polyphenolic content in their olives. Or they can blend, as Tuscans have always done.

The oil’s pungency  — some call it spiciness  — is often mistaken for a defect, while its antithesis, butteriness, is valued by US consumers, especially by many food professionals. Another Spanish producer told me that he blends specifically for butteriness, adding Manzanilla to the mix for the American market (and not for the Japanese). “But we don’t consider that particularly desirable,” he said apologetically. When American publications conduct taste tests of extra virgin olive oils, it’s almost always the bland and buttery ones that win out. Yet those are the very oils that are apt to be, if anything, over the hill and often seriously defective, when they are not downright fraudulent. Polyphenols fade with time, some more rapidly than others. A buttery extra virgin might be made from late-harvest olives, such as the Taggiasca from Liguria or from the many Provençal varieties that are low in polyphenols to start with. Or it might have had a vigorous kick in its youth but is now well past middle age. In Tuscany, as my daughter, the chef Sara Jenkins, has written elsewhere, we use those as all-purpose cooking oils in dishes where the flavor of the oil is not a key factor. They’re not bad oils  — but they’re not very good either.

Extra virgin olive oil is very much like wine, which also depends on polyphenols for much of its structure and flavor  — however, unlike wine, olive oil does not improve with age, a major point (though even experts commonly like to wait a month or more for the initial heat and bitterness to subside). Recently I talked about both wine and oil with Mario Bertuccioli, professor of enology at the University of Florence and chair of the Società Italiana dei Scienze Sensoriali. Dr. Bertuccioli praised freshness and fruitiness in wine  — fruitiness, he said, not of raspberries, not of cherries, but that expresses the wine’s own grapy essence. In olive oil, too, he said, freshness and fruitiness are important, perhaps the critical points in judging excellence. Dr. Bertuccioli, who is as much an expert on the sensory aspects of olive oil as he is on those of wine, emphasized that an olive variety, or a combination of varieties, can be  — and ought to be  — as distinctive an indicator of terroir and of regional culture as wine is.

A huge number  — possibly thousands, no one really knows  — of different olive varieties are grown around the Mediterranean, most of them specific to a region, often a very small region at that. Tonda Iblea, for instance, grows in the Monte Iblei hills of southeastern Sicily, and jet-black Rougettes on the west bank of the Rhone in southern France. Even better-known varieties, like Frantoio, Coratina, and Arbequina, are traditionally linked to a region (Tuscany, Puglia, and Catalonia, respectively). Farmers cultivate varieties that grow well in the soil and climate of the place where they are. And olive trees are exceptionally long-lived. (One tree in Sardinia is judged to be at least 3,000 years old.) As a result, a taste for those particular olives, that particular oil, evolves in that particular region. The sweet nuttiness of Catalan Arbequina suits the region’s emulsified and oil-based sauces (allioli, romesco, nutty picada) and the many dishes in which tomatoes play an important role. And certainly the pungent, spicy flavors of Frantoio and Moraiolo and of Coratina are essential to the bean stews and purées of Tuscany and Puglia.

This suggests that a cook who wants to reproduce as closely as possible the taste of a Pugliese dish, such as fave e cicoria (a creamy purée of dried fava beans served with savory wild chicory greens), would do well to seek out a Coratina-based Pugliese olive oil to dribble over the presentation. And to a certain extent, that is true. But the cook might be just as happy with an equally pungent Moraiolo oil from Umbria, or a Koroneiki from the island of Crete, or even an oil from the often-scorned Picual from Andalucía. All these oils are very high in polyphenols, strong-flavored, spicy, pungent, and excellent choices to cook with or garnish any dish of beans  — which, after all, are bland and sweet on their own.

How, in the end, does one sort his or her way through all of this? Experts have said over and over: You must taste and taste and taste. Taste oils side by side as often as possible because only thus will you have a real appreciation of the vast differences among them. Taste different oils with the same plate. For instance, a dish of beans, cooked as simply as possible, and served on three saucers with three oils from different parts of the world; or a tomato sauce, again very simply prepared, and served with three different oils. Then you start to appreciate what an oil can bring to a dish. Tuscan producer Paolo Pasquali, who developed the Oleoteca Villa Campestri tasting room at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in California, explained, “Extra virgin olive oil can exalt a flavor, it can meld flavors, and it can suppress flavors.” Different oils do this in different ways. It’s worth cooking with extra virgin and not refined oil. Yes, the heat drives off the extra virgin’s best flavors, but the heat used in cooking doesn’t come anywhere near the kind of aggressive assault on the oil represented by the process of refining it. And even in cooking, better oil does taste better, although the very best is probably wasted. And, as Pasquali noted, very often cooking with an extra virgin olive oil can contribute mightily to the success of a dish. Just try this: fry an egg in extra virgin and another in refined olive oil or seed oil. Taste them both and you’ll see how much the good oil adds to the egg’s great flavor.

If you live far from an olive region, buying oil is something like buying fresh fish: you have to cultivate a relationship with a shopkeeper you can respect and trust. Read the bottle labels, which for a fine estate-bottled oil tell you what olives are in the mix and something about how the oil was made. Check for a harvest or “use by” date  — the latter is usually two years from harvest but keep in mind that the oil will naturally have lost most of its freshness by the end of a year. It may still be excellent for cooking, but will no longer have the vibrancy that gave it its original flavors. There is no point in recommending a list of good olive oils, because many of the best are only available in small quantities in limited areas of North America, almost none being widely distributed, and because there is no guarantee that the fine oil that leaves the producer will be equally fine when the consumer buys it. Most shops, not to mention distributors, simply do not handle oil well.

If you really want to experience the shockingly exalted flavor of fresh oil, plan a trip to an olive region  — whether the Mediterranean, California, Australia, or South America  — during the harvest, generally from mid-autumn to early winter wherever you are in the world. The boldness, the assertiveness, the sheer goodness of fresh, green oil, straight from the mill  — or frantoio, almazara, moulin d’olives  — will change your entire understanding of what olive oil is all about. ●


From issue 89

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