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| The olives, different varieties,
pits, skins 'n all are ground into a thick, viscous paste which is then
poured and spread onto large round mats, formerly made of hessian but
now a synthetic material. These loaded mats have a hole in the middle and are piled one on top of another around a central 'spindle'. The end result is an enormous stack of such mats, resembling a huge stack of pancakes, loaded onto a wheeled trolley. This stack, as tall as a man, is then placed under a press, again electrically powered but once driven by water, mule or man. The photographs below show a very old example that was slowly screwed down by the act of pulling round the levered arm. |
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Here you can see a stack of the old hessian mats that were used to separate the layers of crushed olives. They are sitting on the monumental block of stone, carved with runnels and a funnel mouth, that received the oil as it flowed from above. |
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| Once this stack has been slowly
and powerfully compressed, the resultant liquid is a mixture of oil and
water. The final stage then, is to place this liquid into a centrifuge
which spins at high speed and separates the oil from the water. The vivid
oil that emerges, green as it will never be again, is traditionally tasted
poured neat onto some fresh bread, and will also form part of the traditional
zuppa frantoiana, a thick bean and vegetable soup that is poured
over toasted garlic bread and topped off with abundant quantities of fresh
oil. The oil was traditionally stored in large terracotta urns, sometimes buried in the cellar floor, but will nowadays go home in large stainless steel drums. |
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| This oil, perhaps labelled
as 'cold-press' and 'non-filtered' is truly the real thing, the oil of
the first pressing - the prima spremitura. Yes it is Extra-Virgin,
but it is much more than that. Or rather it is nothing other than
that. The only requirement of an Extra Virgin oil is that it have an acidity
level of less than one percent. It is perfectly possible to obtain an
Extra-Virgin oil from a blend of different oils, even oils of different
countries, but sometimes the processes used to reduce the acidity levels
involve rather forceful methods such as heat and chemical treatment. It has always surprised me that really good olive oil isn't more expensive than it is already. Keeping the olive groves tended, pruning the trees and collecting the olives are all very labour intensive tasks, and the yield in a poor year can be as low as ten percent - some years see virtually no olives on the trees at all. So yes, you are going to pay a great deal for a good olive oil, but now you perhaps don't begrudge it quite so much. |
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| Tips and pointers |
You may have arrived via one of the following pages:
Tuscany (hints & tips) - 'Food, wine and olive oil'Events in November
Events in December
