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olive oil

Tasty week – olive oil, wine technology and the physiology of taste

We’ve had a lovely oily tasty sniffy week, with our first oil tastings and some coaching on olfaction and taste thresholds.

Our oil guy, Alessandro Bosticco, is an inspired teacher, a sommelier as well as an olive oil expert, and I was happy to hear he’ll be steering us through some wine tastings as well. I particularly warmed to him when he dodged a question about his favourite olive oil by saying that he simply loved tasting new things, and if he were offered the choice between his current favourite and one he’d never tried, he’d take the one he’d never tried.


He said oil tastings were rare, even in Italy, and to do them as we were, by tasting oil from cups (rather than by dipping bread) was still fairly unusual. We tried four different kinds on each of the two days. Oil is what carries flavour to our tastebuds, and it does its job well; so, being oil, its flavour is hard to purge from the palate. We had to allow more time between tastings than we would for wine, and take sips of bottled water and slices of apple – granny smith being the apple of choice for oil tastings because it is the most acidic.

We heard about the craze for fresh, unfiltered oils in Bosticco’s own local oil-producing region (Tuscany): cloudy and bright-coloured, these oils are not, he said, good for the long run, because the particles in them are fibres that have not been extracted during filtration, and which will trap water which can in its turn trap bacteria. So murk or sediment will affect the oil’s flavour adversely over time, and he advised that if you intend to keep your oil more than a few weeks, to get a clearer one. Even then it’s not going to last more than about 18 months, with a steady decline in colour and flavour as time goes by. More than once he remarked that the oil you taste today is as good as it’s going to get: it is not a product that improves with aging. Rather it is a living thing that changes over its lifetime. And it’s vulnerable to heat and light, so store it accordingly

We got some pointers on reading labels, and learned about the legal designations of “olive oil”, “virgin olive oil” and “extra virgin olive oil”, as well as a few others, defined by the International Olive Oil Council.

Basically the big deal with extra Virgin Olive Oil is that it must be produced by mechanical means (which is always and inevitably cold pressing, so that phrase added to labels is just hyper marketing). This distinguishes it from the processes used to produce all other kinds of oils (except for specialised niche versions of course), which involve heat and chemicals. Extra virgin oil has to pass a chemical test (it can’t contain more than .8% oleic acid) and it then has to pass a taste test by a panel of experts. This doesn’t guarantee it will taste ‘good’ to everyone, but it gives a basic measure of quality. It may also be the result of blending more than one crop, including crops of different years, but is tested at bottling, so no new blending can taste place once it’s had its testing.

There’s a statement which for 2 years now must appear on bottles of Extra Virgin Olive Oil: it must be described as “superior quality oil obtained straight from olives using only mechanical means of production.” That again is no guarantee of flavour (which is subjective anyway) or origin. Most of the olive oil in Europe is produced in Spain, but Italy has the highest consumption, ergo much of what we describe as Italian olive oil is imported and only bottled in Italy.

So for those who want Italian and only Italian olive oil, there is a fairly recent DOP designation (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Denomination of Origin) – a high falutin’ version of extra virgin, which is subject to standards governing where and how the olives may be grown, pressed and bottled as oil. This oil of course sells at a considerable premium. It would be one instance where the bottler will note the date of harvest on the bottle, giving you an indication of the freshness and therefore the power of the oil’s aroma and flavour.

Farther down the scale, what is sold simply as Olio d’Oliva, or Olive Oil, is a blend of refined (by chemical means) olive oil and virgin olive oils. Virgin Olive Oil is produced by mechanical means and has a higher measure of oleic acid than Extra Virgin.

Olive oil is used in its traditional market – Mediterranean, for example – for traditional reasons such as taste. In the newer and ever expanding world-wide markets, it’s been picked up for its health benefits, as it’s a pure unsaturated oil containing fat-soluble vitamins (A and E) and antioxidants. Among the many other advantages it has over other oils, as enumerated by the Oil Council, when you use it for frying, it adds less fat to fried foods because it forms a crust on the surface of the food that impedes the penetration of oil and improves the food’s flavour.

There are different taste preferences for olive oil that are partly cultural: people raised on animal fats tend to prefer milder olive oils to more pungent peppery ones with their bitter after-bite. We had a reinforcement of the advice about becoming a good taster: to taste and smell many different things in order to build an olfactory library, so you have a more comprehensive memory of tastes and flavours to compare.

Due to some weird global synergy, BBC Food Programme and NPR both had programs on olive oil this month.

We also had a first lesson on wine technology… ack – more chemistry. Still, we are paddling around in the sea of knowledge and one day it will all make sense.

We finished the week with a lesson on the physiology of taste from Mirco Marconi. We’d heard already about the classification of taste – sweet, salty, bitter and acid (plus the newcomer, umami, which reflects ‘meaty’ tastes). We learned that the position of taste buds on the tongue is not as static as had originally been supposed, with fixed areas for each taste, but that they are in fact in an overlapping range of regions with the central area of the tongue the least sensitive.

Bitter tastes linger longest because of their placement on the sides of the papillae where the flavour gets ‘stuck’ until it is washed out. We heard that there are varying proportions of the world’s population who are unable to taste bitter (3% in West Africa, 40% in India, 30% of white people in North America; 37% of Italians).

We heard about two theories of taste, which are called either molecular shape theory vs molecular vibrational theory, or docking criteria vs swipe card model. The first supposes that there is a ‘lock and key’ relationship between odorant and receptor: odorous molecules have shapes and sizes that “fit into” the shape and size of corresponding olfactory receptors. In the second, it’s supposed that receptors in the olfactory organs recognise molecules by their vibration, so the nose acts as a kind of spectroscope.

We got into hands-on mode for some tastings and sniffings. We sipped our way through nine samples representing sweet, salty, acid, bitter, umami and astringent – substances dissolved in water – comfortingly straightforward. We then finished by attempting to identify thirty different olfactory samples, ranging from smoke to mint, from cloves to coconut and saffron to bergamot. Fiendishly difficult.

And finally, we were welcomed to Parma officially before Christmas, and here’s the official photo!

What a week: oil, food culture, slaughterhouses, sensory analysis – and a party

Lost some time last week to the flu, but it was a well parenthesised week nonetheless. We returned to classes on Monday with a lecture on olive oil history by our very own Allen J Grieco. It was an interesting and illuminating trip and unpacked a few things that hadn’t sat side by side in front of us before: the triumvirate of wine, bread and oil, for example, which travel together through Italian history with an importance not just as food for the body, but as tools of the church as well. Note to self: to ensure perpetuity of product, make sure it’s adopted as a religious symbol (in your local dominant religion). We’re looking forward to more about oil this month; later today we have our first oil tasting which sounds exciting.

Last Thursday afternoon, I had managed to crawl out of the covers and enjoy the presentations of my classmates in Laura Mason’s final afternoon on food culture. We heard about pie, curry, marmalade, tea, cake, pudding and more; some of the groups had brought samples, but in my weakened state I thought rice pudding was about as much as I should attempt.

Friday was my first full day of classes, and we had a talk on animal welfare and slaughterhouses in the morning followed by an introduction to sensory analysis in the afternoon. We sat in what I can best describe as an uncertain silence while a number of translation difficulties in the first lecture were overcome, and took what we could from the slides. The gist of it was that there is masses of EU legislation covering animal welfare but the balance is heavily on the side of he who wields the butcher knife (or indeed the electrical stunning tongs). The animal’s welfare is protected because it is a living creature, but that’s about it for empathy and compassion; the rest of the formula aims to reduce stress and suffering because otherwise the quality of the meat suffers.

We aren’t sure yet if we’ll be visiting the slaughterhouse itself to witness the mechanics of that link in the carnivore’s food chain, but many of us are willing to see it, to understand the whole of the practice and perhaps face the reality of what we eat. The lecturer’s remark that he could not show photos on the slides because there was “too much blood to see things clearly” suggests it’s not an easy show; and he responded to one question about the emotional effect on the people working at the pointy end of things by saying that it’s not a job a sensitive person would take on. He himself was trained in veterinary science and works as an inspector in the slaughterhouse, where his job is to check that the animal’s health before and after death won’t impede its use as meat for human consumption. A far cry from coaxing kittens back to health; but doesn’t every occupation to some extent offer you a series of unlikely choices on which to apply your training? I suppose the doctors who oversee lethal injections are at similar poles of application.

About sensory analysis I will only say this to myself: get thee to a calculator. Our instructor, well known by his students as an… unusual personality, is very much an expert in his field, and I’m looking forward to seeing our tasting booths from the inside. We learned about the particularities of choosing a tasting panel, when a food producer tests, as it continuously does, its products for quality and consumer ratings. Not a simple process of pulling likely looking suspects in off the street. Nosiree, there’s math in them thar hills. We ended our first class with a brief lesson in finding the geometrical mean of a panel’s taste threshold. Yowza.

Luckily the weekend spread before us, and a happy series of gatherings to fill our calendars. I did not make it to the farewell drinking dancing extravaganza in Colorno, but it sounds like a lively and long-lived event. I did gather my strength to attend the ABCD B&W; Birthday Bash on Saturday: Amy, Bruno, Clementine and Don had alphabetically conspired to have more or less consecutive birthdays to celebrate, and the theme was a mercifully simple one: black and white, which most everyone adhered to, including Bruno’s profiteroles, fresh from Harnold’s Gelateria:

I speak from experience to say that nothing restores the strength of a post-flu victim faster than a profiterole slathered with chocolate and filled with gelato. Still, around 2am, with the dancing in full swing, I decided to be the early-to-bed type and slunk off into the Parma night. Or tried to. Turns out I am still culturally challenged by the inside, outside and all around the townside locks on the buildings here. So, having shut the main entry door behind me and proceeded a few metres to the iron gate to the street, I discovered the exit gate was well and truly locked, and swiftly deduced that the unlocking mechanism must be just inside the now locked entry door.

Choices:
a) climb the iron fence in my skirt and weakened (ok and slightly wine-soaked) state – not a great option, although doable since the gate did not have pointy bits on the top of each bar;
b) walk the perimeter of the building and seek alternate exit point (=none found);
c) buzz for assistance from hostesses of high velocity party upstairs.

I opted for c) and then realised this would entail standing on lower rung of gate to read building buzzer name plate upside down, while not strangulating self between bars (you do not want to ring the wrong bell at this hour, I reasoned). I was never a girl scout but I did have a shiny perfume lid I could hold in front of the names to help a bit. Found the right bell. Rang it. Discovered next problem, which was that due to imminent strangulation I could not actually speak into the speaker bit. Luckily Corrie thought to look out the window and came down and released me and the next guest, who swooshed off into the night on her bicycle.

And she was not the only one on wheels at that time of night.