Learn Your Olive Oil

Whether you’re being served bread in a restaurant with oil, making a salad at home or touring olive groves in Spain, Italy or Greece, it’s important to get a better understanding of both the price, production techniques and uses for different grades of this liquid gold.

Olive oil forgery/fraud has reached proportions unseen in or unreported, especially in Italy, in the last decade, forcing the International Olive Commission into a bit of a panic to rethink a few policies, but one should not be shifting from extra virgin to a lower grade until you realize when it’s just too strong.

Those that haven’t changed are the ones that shouldn’t really change and that’s the distinction by which olive oil is graded. Extra virgin olive oil will always be the distinction you should count on enjoying beyond all others when looking for olive oil.

And for that matter, get used to using it in all the manners mentioned in the first paragraph as anything less would be nearly uncivilized. The distinction for this grade is simply that EVOO has free acidity, expressed as oleic acid at no more than 0.8 grams per 100 grams.

That is why olive oil is considered a healthy fat and its prices can range from as little as €6 per liter in Italy to well over €200 per liter based on the age of the trees, the manner in which the oil is extracted and often simply a family name.

But don’t strive for lower-quality oil than extra virgin unless you are looking for something more neutral in taste and that’s when it’s time to maybe look at simply virgin olive oil or high-quality neutral oil for other uses.