Obsessed with Olive Oil Documentary - Chapter 2

OBSESSED WITH OLIVE OIL DOCUMENTARY - CHAPTER 2: TRADITION VS. QUALITY
So as human beings, and maybe it's the marketing machine and the world that we live in, we tend to assume that tradition is great. Anything that's traditional it's fantastic but sometimes for a lot of things, and especially when it comes to olive oil when we're talking about tradition, it's sometimes the enemy of quality. Because it's traditional, doesn't mean that it's actually good.
Olive oil is actually very easy to make. All you have to do is literally crush some olives, but to make it well is an extremely difficult and expensive process. There are so many things that can go wrong. The oil can be exposed to heat, to oxygen and contaminants and the simple passage of time is extremely damaging to it.
Traditionally, farmers would wait for the olives to mature and fall to the ground, and this is where the fermentation would begin. Then they would gather them and store them in sacks, sometimes for days in order to avoid going to the mill more than once, and again the fermentation would continue.
See, this is what you don't do, put it in bags, close them off, not aired. These things have probably been in a bag for, I don't know, a few days anyway. The mills were obviously not very clean and while the olives were being crushed, they would be exposed to the air and the debris of the olive's exterior, as well as dirty water.
Technically, this process still gave us an olive oil, but that's about it. Nothing that would change your life. In fact, it would probably ruin your dish but this is what our palate was accustomed to, and unfortunately
in most parts of the world, it still is.
Once your palate gets used to a rancid oil you stop noticing it. You get used to the taste. We all grew up with rancid oils, me as well. But when I discovered that a good oil is different, I can no longer stand
a rancid oil.
So, we can say that tradition, at times, when people talk about their uncle's oil or grandfather's oil and tradition and quality, even if the word "tradition" is beautiful. It has nothing to do with quality.
Yes! They bring to your table bottles of oil, for crying out loud, don't have just one defect, but are full of defects with brutal rancidity. People will wait for food while dipping their bread in that oil, but if by chance they bring to the table a piece of prosciutto with some yellow fat that is rancid,
they immediately discard it in disgust because it is rancid. But the oil they've been dipping in that is terribly rancid is still considered good. And so this baffles me.
In Salento, many years ago all of the trees would be on this red sandy terroir that was completely flat. This helped with the harvest, as traditionally all of the olive growers in Salento would wait for the olives
to fall to the ground and sweep them up. So they wouldn’t really be picking the olives. This was for many reasons, to lower the production costs because you needed less people. And maybe because culturally we couldn’t perceive the defects or damage it would inflict on the olives when falling to the ground.
Often, people come and say, "Hey, but I'm from Puglia. We make the best oil." Or, "Hey, but I'm from Calabria. We make the best oil." And then, if their father-in-law has 2 olive trees and makes 2 litres of oil then they say, "My oil is homemade."
Unfortunately, this conviction is the hardest thing to demystify, the idea that homemade oil is the best one. This means absolutely nothing. I always make the same comparison, the homemade wine. More often than not it's undrinkable, tastes like sulfur and is full of defects.
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I'm Fil Bucchino, a former musician turned olive oil expert - an accredited professional olive oil taster (often compared to an advanced or master sommelier in the wine industry), an international contest judge, and a premium olive oil producer.
I collaborate with chefs and restaurants on olive-centric dinners and events and consult with various institutions and chambers of commerce. Yearly, I travel back to Tuscany to produce, test and airship a limited amount of premium extra virgin olive oil. I do this with Abandoned Grove, where we rescue and rejuvenate groves back to their former glory.
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