Olive oil? Why the heck am I talking about olive oil?

As I’ve mentioned before, during quarantine, I’ve found immense joy in learning new things through experiences like Airbnb’s virtual experiences, REI’s virtual classes, other online learning platforms, and reading more than I have in years.  

While browsing Airbnb’s virtual experiences, I found a virtual experience called Farm to Table Mediterranean. It was hosted by a young man who lived on his family farm in Croatia. My dad and I have both visited Croatia separately. We’d really enjoyed our time there so I thought this would be a fun virtual experience to do with my parents. It was a nice way to do something with them while being thousands of miles apart.

As it turns out… it was also a nice way to learn a lot about olive oil. Which turned out to be way more interesting than expected.

A while back, my mom had mentioned that her natural medicine doctor, Dr. Steelsmith, had told her that most olive oils are low quality and often not good for us. “Extra virgin olive oil” doesn’t mean much these days. However, during this experience, we discovered that that fact was just the tip of an iceberg (if icebergs were made out of olives).

I’m now something of an olive oil snob and am hoping to be cast for in an olive oil interpretation of the movie Sideways.

You can always sign up for the experience yourself (I totally recommend it). But if you don’t have time, I thought I’d share some of my key takeaways.

What you don’t know about olive oil:

1. Your olive oil is probably too old

I don’t know about you, but before I participated in this experience, I kept olive oils in my pantry for years. It never crossed my mind that olive oil could go bad. It’s oil! But I was wrong. Olive oil actually goes bad after about four years. It’s best to use the oil within two years. Who knew?

Oh, and it’s not the best oil to cook with. Though I won’t go too far into why you should be cooking with other types of oils (maybe I will in a later post), it’s best to use the high-quality olive oil on fish or as dressing for a salad. Uncooked, raw, and filled with polyphenols and omegas. Speaking of which…

2. Olive oil is all about the Polyphenols 

High-quality olive oils have polyphenols. This adds a bitter taste to your olive oil (and that’s a good thing!). These are micronutrients that are thought to have numerous health benefits including helping with digestion and cardiovascular diseases. However, depending on when the olives are harvested, how the oil is extracted, and the packaging conditions, the number of polyphenols in your olive oil will vary. Let’s just say many of the bottles in stores have used olives that are too ripe, are chemically treated, have exposed the oil to heat, and other not-so-great factors that decrease the number of polyphenols in the olive oil. 

3. You’ve got to slow your roll

Another way to tell if you have quality olive oil is with its viscosity. High-quality olive oil is viscous. This means it’s a thicker substance. In our virtual experience, the host put high-quality olive oil next to sub-par olive oil on a plate. Then he flipped the plate so that the oils began dripping down toward the ground. It was obvious that there was more than just olive oil added to the sub-par version. It had been diluted with something else (another type of oil, most likely). It quickly rolled down the plate while the high-quality olive oil moved slower, sliding like molasses.

4. Fresh is the best; Sweet is not a treat

We also did a smell and taste test. We each poured a small amount of oil into a shot glass. (I’ve been sober for most of quarantine so this felt like a real thrill for me 😂). Then we smelled the oil and tasted it. Turns out, premium oils smell fresh. Okay, if I’m being honest, mine mostly smelled like oil, but there was definitely a mowed grass element there as well. 

Medium-quality olive oils smell woody or like hazelnuts. 

Low-quality oils smell like soil or dirt after it rains. 

As for the taste, a high-quality oil will taste fresh as well. It will also have some type of mellow fruit flavor (I felt like an idiot when I said that mine had a hint of pear flavor but was congratulated with a “yes!” from our host. (Apparently, tasting pear is a good sign).

There will also be the bitterness of the polyphenols and a peppery feeling in the back of your throat. 

Oh, and sweetness? That’s not a quality of olive oil. Though you can taste fruit like pears, lemon, or grapefruit, the overall effect should be fresh and bitter. Sweet means it’s been mixed with something else.  

5. Start throwing

No, I don’t mean to start throwing your low-quality olive oil bottles around your home. I’m not trying to get sued here. And I don’t mean start throwing olive oil onto everything… though adding it into your diet sounds like it’s probably a good idea. 

I’m talking about throwing pottery. 

Turns out, the best way to store olive oil is in a ceramic container. This keeps out the UVs and keeps the oil cool. The second best would be the dark glass bottles that you often see in stores. The dark bottles help keep out the light. Don’t go for anything clear.

And there you have it! My five facts that you probably never knew about olive oil. 

Now, many of those facts won’t help you pick out the best olive oil in a grocery store. So here are some tips I learned for that.

How to find high-quality olive oil in the grocery store (what to look for):

• Country of origin. 

  • You only want there to be one country of origin. If there are multiple countries of origin (like my bottle 🤦‍♀️), this means those olives had to travel some distance before they could be processed. OR oil from olives had to travel those distances… most likely in the heat. Neither scenario is great when it comes to quality. Either the olives would have ripened a lot more (leaving you with fewer polyphenols) or the processed oils had higher chances of heat exposure (again, lower polyphenols). It will also be a lot more challenging to know how old your olive oil actually is—though the next tip can help with that.

• Harvest date.

  • Most olive oils will have a “best used by” date listed. This is okay, but what you really want is a harvest date. After all, you want to make sure that you’re enjoying your olive oil prior to that 4-year mark. And what does “best used by” really mean? Is the manufacturer counting 4 years from the date they harvested? Or the date they made the oil? Or the date it was packaged? Having the actual harvest date on the bottle helps you determine how old the olive oil really is.

• Lot number.

  • Finally, what you don’t want to see is a lot number. A listed lot number implies that the olive oil is mass-produced. As with all things, quality and production seem to have an inverse relationship. Meaning: as production goes up, quality goes down. Olive oil with a lot number also signifies that the olive oil was definitely sitting in a lot for an unknown period of time. This means that you have no idea how long it was sitting or how much heat it was exposed to. Not good.

There was a lot more shared during this virtual experience. If you want to become an olive oil snob for yourself, I highly recommend taking it. If not, I still recommend following these tips for shopping for olive oil and hope your salads are spruced up this week.