Wonders of freshly pressed olive oil
THE fragrance of brandnew olive oil is unmistakable. If you’ve ever experienced it, you’ll recognise it ever after. When the oil is fresh from the press, it’s as intense and all-pervasive as the aroma of white truffles, as penetrating as that of fir balsam, as seductive as the smell of June roses.
The best time and place to experience that extraordinary perfume in its fullest impact is at the olive mill – the frantoio, as it’s called in Italy – at the moment newly harvested olives are crushed into oil. Second best is a bottle of fresh, new-season oil, coming into US markets in February and March from Italy, Spain, Greece and, to a lesser extent, France, California and other parts of the olive oil world.
Describing that fragrance to those who don’t know it is another matter. It’s a little greenfruity, like the olives themselves that are not fully ripened but just on the verge. It’s the smell of freshly cut grass. Or of tomato leaves crushed between the fingers. Perhaps it’s a little nutty or a little citrusy, or it has a little fragrance of green apples, or maybe apricots? It’s certainly complex.
I know this because I experience that aroma and flavour every year in October, when I go back with family and friends to harvest olives and make oil on what we cheerfully call the family estate in Tuscany. Don’t, please, imagine a centuriesold villa with faithful retainers in attendance. Ours is an old stone farmhouse, somewhat ineptly restored, on 10 hectares of rocky land in the forested mountains between Tuscany and Umbria.
In brief, there is nothing romantic about this place except for what emerges from the 150 olive trees that I planted some years ago, against all local advice. Those trees now produce annually 60 or 70 litres of fresh, new oil with its extraordinary aroma.
There is romance, for certain, in the old-fashioned but timehonoured way we harvest our ripening olives: by hand, one by one, piling them in baskets and plastic bins, and trucking them off to the local mill.
There is romance, too, in late spring when tiny olive blossoms, pale and almost imperceptible, start to flower, and in summer when we watch anxiously for signs of the olive fly or some other malefactor threatening the hard little green fruits on the trees. Even in winter, when the trees are bare of fruit and the chill north wind whips the branches and turns the leaves silver in slashing rain – even then, there is something romantic about an olive grove like ours.
I did not know that when I had the trees planted.The neighbours all said planting olives was a mistake: They would never thrive at this altitude (above 600 metres), and, besides, wild boar would knock them over. Now, each year when I come back, I find that more of those sceptics have planted olives on their own lands. Put it down to climate change, if you will, but it appears that our mountain valley has become an ideal spot for the kind of olives that make quality extra-virgin oil.
High-quality oils like the one we produce add delight and satisfaction to any dish: a simple green salad, a pasta sauce or a dessert cake or torte. But there’s more to it than romance. The flavours and aromas are also indications of what makes extra-virgin a cornerstone of a healthful Mediterranean diet and one of the best fats to use in cooking: They signify the presence of polyphenols, most of which are health-building antioxidants that help reduce inflammation, strengthen the immune system and defend against heart disease, cancers, diabetes, even age-related cognitive decline.
When I first started to get interested in olive oil, in the early 1990s, this was not wellknown. Olive oil, we were told then, is good for you because it’s primarily a monounsaturated fat, consumption of which reduces dangerous LDL chocolesterol and maintains or even boosts HDL, the “good” cholesterol. But with more research, it became apparent that there were all sorts of other things going on.
Extra-virgin olive oil is a unique product because, unlike regular olive oil (sometimes called “pure olive oil”), it is unrefined and retains all those polyphenols that are available in the raw fruit. Regular and “light” olive oils have had the aromas and flavours stripped away to stabilise the product. It stands to reason that the fresher the extra-virgin, the more fragrance and flavour it carries, the more polyphenols come along for the ride.
And that’s what we were smelling and tasting last October at Massimo Landi’s frantoio on the Arezzo highway just north of Cortona, as we watched our glossy leccino olives get transformed into dazzling jade-coloured oil. All our workers were assembled for the occasion: two American chefs and one Italian, an Italian photographer, six visiting Americans and two small, energetic children.
To my mind, the speed with which olives are transformed into oil is one of the critical points for producing the highest quality. Extra-virgin is a fragile commodity; any exposure to light or heat will start an inexorable progress towards rancidity.
As the green oil flowed into the stainless-steel tins in which we transport it, we licked it off our fingers, dipped in plastic spoons, and then rushed it home to serve it up on the most glorious of newoil treats: bruschetta. This is what the Florentines call the fettunta, the anointed slice: crusty unsalted Tuscan bread, toasted over a wood fire, then rubbed lightly with a cut clove of garlic, doused in the new oil and gently sprinkled with salt.
Then we trooped over the fields to our neighbours, the Antolinis, to celebrate with a feast of the new harvest – more bruschette with many different toppings, Maura Antolini’s superb aka lasagna, rabbits, pigeons, a shoulder of pork, and chickens from the family courtyard where the birds scratch and grub – all roasted in the wood-fired oven built into the house wall more than a century ago. And finally a superb crostata, an open-faced tart, made with apricots.
Last year was not a great harvest. Like many fruit trees, olives tend to produce more in alternate years, and last year was clearly an off one.
We took to the frantoio a little more than four quintales (that’s less than half a tonne) of olives; the yield in the end was about 10 percent, so we went home with just under 50 litres of oil.
But what fabulous oil it was! Every year, we admit, is better than the year before. Will we ever reach perfection? Not in this lifetime, perhaps, but we keep trying.