IAN & SPAIN

If you have read my previous articles you will be fully aware that just because it says “Extra Virgin” on the bottle, doesn’t necessarily mean it is. So once you have pre-selected your Olive Oil through choice of packaging and labeling “clues”, the next step is to taste it, to really know if what is on the outside represents what is on the inside and more often than not this is not the case. This does not mean that Olive Oil is doomed and there is no hope for anyone! It means that the consumers need to educate themselves to be able to recognise a real Extra Virgin and then happily discard the rest, yes throw it away! Don’t think “Oh no! That cost me €10 I can’t throw it away”, rather, think that what you have just learned is going to save you €10 euros or more every time you buy a bottle in the future and you are not going to be taken for a ride anymore! You can read all you want about olive oil days in and days out but unless you get down to the nitty-gritty of tasting several different olive oils and different varieties you won’t start to build your palate knowledge. You don’t need to taste dozens and dozens of olive oils to get a basic understanding of “taste”, the chances are you are already familiar with a few and probably just don’t know how to classify them and the chances are you are more accustomed to bad olive oil than good olive oil, so you will have to reset your taste buds and re-educate your brain.

It is important to understand that for Extra Virgin Olive Oil to be classified as Extra Virgin it must pass two tests. Firstly a chemical test that measures the characteristics that must meet the International Olive Oil Council standards (I discussed this in part 2) and secondly it must pass an organoleptic test by a board of olive oil tasters of no less than eight members. This is where the “taste” is classified and it is determined whether the olive oil is in fact in line with the Extra Virgin flavour standards and shows absolutely no signs of defects. You may ask if all olive oil has to go through this process to be considered Extra Virgin how is it that when it gets to your table on many occasions it isn’t. Well it’s not just the farmers and the brands that cheat the system at times, but also the tasters! Once it has been classified it may well be blended and packaged poorly before it reaches you as well. So who will be the best judge in the end? You will.

                                    Tasting room for flavour control

I have been tasting olive oils for at least fifteen years and have been fortunate enough to learn from one of the country’s finest agronomic specialists in this field and master blender, Miguel Abad, an incredible man who’s family has been in the olive oil world for generations, a man, with just one sip, is able to detect all the different varieties of olives used in a blended olive oil, on one occasion I saw him detect 7 different varieties, quite incredible. Most people would have difficulty naming 7 varieties let alone tasting them all mixed together! Anyway let’s not get carried away one doesn’t need to reach this level to enjoy olive oil. 

Recently Olive Oil tasting has been turned into something similar to wine tasting where you see pro olive oil tasters talking about all sorts of traits, positive and negative that can be detected in the aromas and flavours such as “ freshly cut grass, banana, cucumber, brine, mint, sour milk and green tea” and it always made me think, how on earth is an olive going to smell like freshly cut grass or sour milk or even green tea, what a load of rubbish! These people are going round the bend trying to make something that is quite simple more complicated than it is. Come on, green tea? It doesn’t even grow in Spain! Sour milk? You’ll never see a cow anywhere near an olive tree. However these are all terminologies that people have been using as “reference names” for main traits that olive oils carry. When they say “freshly cut grass” or “Green tea” they mean fruity or unripe olives and when they say “sour milk” they mean an aroma associated with muddy sediment. So why can’t they just say so? It would be a lot easier wouldn’t it? What does sour milk have to do with muddy sediment? God knows. Nonetheless I will be posting a glossary of tasting terminology just in case you read a report on any olive oil you will be able to “translate” it into plain English!

Let’s get back to basics, forget about the freshly cut grass and the sour milk and let’s focus on what determines an extra virgin olive oil, all these different reference points will come with time. There are only three positive attributes with an extra virgin olive oil and over thirty ways of describing them but what we want at this stage is just to recognise them, because if one of the three is not present it quite simply is not an extra virgin. They are; Fruitiness (green or mature), Bitterness and Pungency. This is the order of importance and also the order in which you should notice them as you smell and taste your olive oil. The first step is to smell your olive oil, and the smell we are looking for is a fruity smell, notes of green unripe olive fruit or ripe olive fruit, basically dominant vegetable and herbaceous notes. Which is why many make reference to grass, artichokes or herbs and green tea. If it doesn’t smell fruity it is not extra virgin and is more likely a virgin olive oil or a simple olive oil. It must resemble freshly crushed olives. 

                Source : Flavour wheel Richard Gawel  www.aromadictionary.com/oliveoilwheel.html 

How is the best way to smell this? Take a wine glass (if you happen to have blue tasting glass fantastic! But who has one of those right?), one that has a narrower mouth to the glass than the cup at the base. This is important as we want the opening of the glass it to fit comfortably into the palm of your hand and the base of the cup to fit into your other palm, placing the leg of the glass between your fingers, to cover as much surface area of the glass as possible with your palm. Pour in about 20ml of olive oil and then we need to slightly warm the olive oil to around 28º C which is an ideal temperature for all the volatile aromas to leave the oil and get trapped at the mouth of the glass. So, covering the top of the glass with the palm of your hand and holding the cup of the glass in our other hand, we tilt the glass about 30º and start to turn it through our hands without removing the hand from the top, for about a minute or so. You will notice that if you are doing it properly the oil will be swirling around the glass slowly and you will be creating friction on the glass with both of your hands helping to warm up the glass as well as transferring body heat to it. Then remove your hand from the top of the glass, put your nose in the glass and take a good whiff of the aroma. Remember we want to detect a fruity smell. If you don’t notice a fruity smell, unripe or mature, mild or strong, it doesn’t matter; kiss good-bye to your extra virgin. 

The human nose is capable of detecting an unlimited quantity of aromas but the human tongue has very defined areas for each flavour; Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter and Umami (protein – savoury). Umami is not a flavour that we associate ever with olive oil. At this stage the most important flavour is Bitterness. Many would say “sweet” too, well yes, we do associate the word “sweet” with olive oils quite a bit but only when we want to make reference to the fact that it is an oil with little or no bitterness and pungency. It is not actually a “sweet” olive oil. Bitterness is detected at the back of the tongue as you can see from the diagram below. If you have ever tasted an olive from the tree, you will know what bitter is! It is quite different to standard table olives, which sometimes go through a de-bittering process.

Now slowly take a decent sip, here “tactile attributes” comes into play with the texture of the oil, which should be velvety, thick and buttery in the sensation that it gives on entering the mouth, if it thin and liquid like…. Bye-Bye. Move the oil around your mouth and close your teeth together. Place your tongue up against your upper teeth and breath in slowly through the sides of your mouth, not through the front making the oil slurp and bubble as if it was a wine. What we are trying to do is coax more aromas out of it but concentrating them on the areas of the tongue where we are going to detect them better, i.e. the sides and the back, then breath out through your nose. This retro-nasal perception will help amplify the aromas between the mouth and the nose and help you detect other positive or negative aromas. Mainly here we should be confirming that our nasal perception of fruitiness is also present in the taste and secondly that we notice bitterness. Bitterness, although an acquired taste, is a positive attribute of Extra Virgin and should be present to a greater or lesser degree. The earlier an olive is harvested the more bitter it will be. This bitterness is actually caused by polyphenols, the olive’s antioxidant so it is very positive. The higher the level of polyphenols the more bitter it is and the longer the oil will last as it’s the polyphenols that slow down the oxidation of the olive oil over time. So Bitter is “Good”.  If an oil is very bitter and has a high level of antioxidants it will also be referred to as an “astringent” extra virgin, which leaves a puckering sensation in the mouth and makes it difficult to slide your tongue around the roof of your mouth, similar to when you eat an artichoke or a caqui. 

Now we swallow the oil to carry out what we call the “passive touch” (tactile atributes). This is when we will determine the pungency of the olive oil. It is not a taste but a chemical reaction in the throat which is similar that caused by pepper.  Pungency is a positive attribute and its intensity will depend on the variety but all Extra Virgins should have some degree of pungency. Very pungent oil will be referred to as robust olive oil and a less pungent olive oil is referred to as smooth olive oil. Pungency is a peppery sensation that is detected in the throat. It is an irritation and an acquired sensation as with chillies. A smooth olive oil can leave just a tingle while a robust olive oil can make you cough, several times. I have known cases where people have been even scared by it thinking that they had swallowed some deadly chemical! However once you get used to that peppery kick it’s hard to go back to anything less. Few people actually know why this sensation is actually a positive attribute. Taste is easy to understand, but this chemical irritation? Why would it be an attribute? Well it’s quite simple and was really only scientifically explained about six years ago. Extra Virgin Olive oil contains a chemical compound called Oleocanthal which provokes coughing and this chemical characteristic is unique and only found in cold pressed olive oil. If the olive oil has been refined this compound disappears completely. 

If we want to continue on and taste another olive oil to compare it, we will need to reset our palate to neutralise the flavour of the previous oil. Ideally we will use bread sticks and a slice of a granny smith apple followed by water.  The bread sticks will help absorb the oil left in our mouth, the granny smiths acidity will neutralise the flavour of the oil, and water will leave our mouths clean for the next test.

So let’s summarise. We’ve smelt the oils and discovered clear notes of fruitiness from the olives, we’ve tasted it and noticed it’s velvety thick texture and confirmed the fruity flavour we noticed while smelling it. Then we’ve detected a certain degree of bitterness and pungency when we swallowed it. If nothing else is detected to distort these flavour or aromas we have an extra virgin before us. However a cold pressed olive oil could have all of these attributes but also carry a few or even just one negative attribute through aroma or taste which would be sufficient to discard it as an Extra Virgin. So now we know what “Good “attributes we need to detect, we now need to go on to learn what “Bad and Ugly” attributes an Extra Virgin should not have, but are all too common on the supermarket shelf.

Olive oil is a live product, some call it an ingredient but I consider it a food as it has vitamins, antioxidants and healthy fats, far more than a mere ingredient. Being a perishable product olive oil tastes better fresh. What is fresh? Well basically up to 8-12 months after the harvest date, the closer to the harvest the better, obviously. At the other end of the scale is rancidity and along the scale a whole lot more. Let’s concentrate on the most common. 

Firstly “fermentation”, there a various types of fermentation that affect the olives once taken from the tree. When olives are harvested they are normally far too many olives to be able to press them all on the same day so mills will create piles or bags of olives while waiting to press them.  In these piles different problems start to occur degrading the quality of the oil, so the result ends up being the same as picking up olives from the ground, which should never be done for Extra Virgin. The outer sides of the piles go through an aerobic fermentation by being in contact with the air, at the same time all the olives are going through a natural fermentation due to lack of oxygen inside the olive and as on many occasions they may have been washed or if it has rained the olive will be wet and generating damp. These problems boost the peroxides in the olives and speed up the oxidisation of the olive and leave very distinct aromas to the oil that can easily be combined with the positive attributes we mentioned earlier. This won’t eliminate fruitiness or bitterness but will partially or completely mask it with what we call a “Fusty” aroma and taste which is what unfortunately most olive oils today taste like! So you will need to identify this and remove it from your “positive palate”. So what does “fusty” smell like? Well it mainly smells like damp in a basement or swampy vegetation or that drawer in the fridge that has a mouldy tomato in it! Umm, lovely.  If the sensation is very strong we can even call it “Musty” which is caused by mouldy olives getting into the press. After pressing there are also possible defects in the handling of the oil, if the oil has not been decanted properly to remove the particles of pulp left in the oil, these particles will remain in the oil and will start to degrade and oxidise the oil boosting peroxides and giving the oil an odour similar to warm lubricating oil. This is referred to as “Dreggish” ó Borras in Spanish. There are more, but at this stage it is worth just concentrating on these notes.

Finally we have Rancid, this is the end of the road. The olive oil is now completely dead and ready to be buried or used to light a lamp on your next camping holiday! We’ve all tried a rancid nut before and the taste it leaves in the mouth is quite awful, don’t confuse it with the bitterness of olive oil.  This is a fat gone bad, something we are all familiar with and it is also sometimes compared to the smell of crayons.  All of these bad and ugly attributes should not be present at all in an extra virgin olive oil, if they are, take it back or throw it away. Everyone can detect a very rancid olive oil, the trick is to detect a slightly rancid olive oil. Practice. One tell tale sign is that it starts to smell of mature strawberries before going rancid.

All this may sound like a complicated process but I assure you if you go out and buy just three or four different extra virgin olive oils in different price ranges, sweet, robust and a standard supermarket brand extra virgin you will soon see the difference and it will all start to click into place. The more you taste the more you will define your palate and your likes and dislikes. However one thing will be certain, you won’t be taken for any more rides!  You will find extra virgins that you like and others that you don’t like so much, some that are too bitter and others that are too peppery or not fruity enough. Tastes are like colours everyone has their own favourite, but it will certainly become a new adventure, with over 750 varieties in the world this could take some time but along the way you will educate your palate and will be able to select oils with specific flavour characteristics that you enjoy and match to certain meals. In my next post I will be writing about different types of Spanish olive oils, varieties, styles and blends to help you all orientate your tastes and find what you are looking for!