In the summer of 2012, an American drugstore-supermarket chain in my Maine neighborhood was advertising Filippo Berio olive oil—plain, light, or extra-virgin, take your pick—in half-liter (16.9-ounce) containers for just $2.99. That’s a little like offering condensed cream of mushroom soup at 10 cents a can. Anyone who falls for it probably deserves the bad soup or bad olive oil in his or her market basket. And it will be bad, believe me. I expect the Berio oil on offer, apart from any other qualities, was seriously out of date, although it was impossible to tell from the information provided on the containers.

It is a situation that is all too typical—out-of-date olive oil (that was not great oil in the first place), offered at fire-sale prices to shoppers who don’t actually have any idea what they are getting.

Often the most difficult fact for consumers to understand is that the finest kind of extra-virgin olive oil is never cheap. Even when you make it yourself. Burton Anderson, an American journalist best known for his writing about Italian wines and winemaking, has lived in Italy for many decades. He also produces his own Tuscan olive oil when he’s not deep in some cantina sampling the latest vintage of Barolo or Brunello. Anderson once went through his accounts and estimated that his own oil, harvested and produced by himself and his wife with a little help from their friends, cost him far more than he could buy it for on the open market anywhere near his home in the hills north of Arezzo. And still he continues to produce it, for the pleasure involved in making his own oil and for the comfort in knowing that it has been made precisely to his own high standards. If he tried to sell it, he said, few would buy. The cost would be prohibitive, simply because the time and effort that go into producing it, in his words, “exceed rational limits.”

There are several reasons why fine oil is costly: A good harvest of sound, healthy olives relies on considerable hand labor, since the olives are harvested almost one by one. Beyond that, it takes a keen and sensitive eye to oversee all stages of the production cycle. The finest kind of oil, as described in Chapters 3 and 4, is almost invariably made from olives handpicked before they are fully mature and rushed to the olive mill within hours of harvesting. The mill must be scrupulously clean and the mill operators must know what they are doing, including accurately judging temperatures and the length of time for the various parts of the operation in order to get the best flavor profile for the oil. And then there’s the question of post-production handling: Oil must be filtered or racked periodically to remove any natural sediment that collects; it must be stored in a dark, cool place, preferably under a flush of inert nitrogen gas to protect it from atmospheric contamination; and it must remain there until it’s time to bottle it and send it out to market. It must be shipped expeditiously, not allowed to linger in the hot sun of a shipping dock in the middle of summer, and then, once it has reached its destination, it must continue to be handled in a correct manner, something no producer can possibly guarantee, especially not small producers who have no way of controlling distant markets once the oil has left their careful hands.

So olive oil is not a cheap commodity. And the fact that there is money to be made from what we might term an essential luxury has led to a range of unscrupulous and illegal practices that make cheap oil, like what I saw in that Maine drugstore-supermarket, even more suspect. Often it’s simply a question of old oil, for olive oil, unlike wine—and this cannot be said often enough—does not get better with age. In fact, the opposite. So a producer, importer, or distributor, left with a large stock of two-year-old oil unsold, may well try to get rid of it by lowering the price. There’s nothing wrong with that practice so long as it’s honestly conducted. If you can be sure of the date when the oil was actually produced, and not just when it was bottled, you might find a bargain cooking oil on your hands. (Like most Tuscan peasants, in our farmhouse kitchen we count on last year’s oil, even oil that’s two years old, for almost all our cooking.) All too often, however, if you didn’t actually make it yourself, there is no way to tell from the label when the oil in question was made, since the expiration date required by law is 18 months from bottling rather than from harvest.

Beyond slapdash handling, however, there is also a good deal of out-and-out fraud practiced on an unsuspecting public. There are many ways to deceive. Certifiably extra-virgin oil may be blended and “stretched” with large amounts of cheaper refined or rectified oil; that is, with oil that failed to meet the extra-virgin standard and has been corrected chemically or physically to make an inert oil with no flavor or aroma. Again, like old oil, this isn’t necessarily bad if you know what you’re buying. But it is completely fraudulent to label it extra-virgin and price it accordingly.

More often, olive oil may be adulterated with chemically refined vegetable or nut oils. Turkish hazelnut oil was a big favorite for some time, and also palm oil and corn/maize oil. Marketing this as olive oil, extra-virgin or not, is, again, fraudulent and illegal, and authorities in countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy, where high-quality olive oil is produced, are increasingly on the alert to protect their national reputations.[1] (This has not always been the case, as detailed in my colleague Tom Mueller’s exhaustive book, Extra-Virginity.) In late 2011, a pair of Spanish businessmen were sentenced to two years in prison for adulterating olive oil with up to 80 percent sunflower oil. Earlier, several Italian processors were convicted of completely faking extra-virgin olive oil by coloring sunflower and soy oils with chlorophyll and beta-carotene to give them the seductive look of green-gold extra-virgin. And those are just the ones who have been caught.

But cases like these, convictions, fines, even jail sentences, don’t actually have much impact on the world of illegal olive oil production. Fraud continues to be practiced, primarily because penalties are light and often impossible to enforce, and the profits to be made by such practices can be stunning.

Possibly even more alarming than faking oil is the practice of altering low-quality olive oil through a process called deodorizing to mask it as extra-virgin. Defective oil, oil made from damaged, overripe, or fermented olives, develops chemical signs called alkyl esters, which remain in the oil even when its nasty flavors and aromas have been removed by steam deodorizing. A test for alkyl esters, recently adopted by the European Union, thus should indicate whether or not the oil was defective to start with and distinguish deodorized oil from true extra-virgin. But it is not clear that the test is accurate, and in any case producers of high-quality oils say the level allowed by EU regulations, 75 milligrams of alkyl esters per kilo of oil, is much too high. Or rather, Italians feel 75 milligrams is way too high; Spanish producers would like to see the permitted level at 100 milligrams. Hence the compromise at 75. But a quality oil, produced from sound olives pressed immediately after harvest, should have a level of not more than 10 or 15 mg of alkyl esters per kilo, much, much lower than the level allowed by EU regulations. A defective oil, deodorized to make its defects no longer apparent, is not only fraudulent but is moreover cheating consumers of the full nutritional benefits of extra-virgin olive oil.

Don’t imagine that Americans are the sole victims here. In Italy’s Marche region a few years ago, the regional environmental agency conducted a test of alkyl esters in extra-virgins produced locally and of supposedly extra-virgin oils produced elsewhere but purchased in local supermarkets. The conclusion? Up to 150 milligrams per kilo of alkyl esters in the supermarket oils, while oils from local olive mills were in the range of 15 milligrams per kilo. Italians too, like the Spanish and doubtless like Greek and French consumers as well, are being cheated of full value when they buy a supermarket “extra-virgin” oil blended from products from all over the olive oil–producing world. That blend typically will include any number of deodorized and otherwise rectified oils.

Add to all this the quantity of mass-produced oils that manage to qualify as extra-virgin, in the sense that they fall within the very loose parameters of free oleic acid (0.8 percent) and peroxide levels (20)—or might have done so at one time before exceeding a normal lifespan—but do not taste all that different from Wesson or Mazola or Crisco, the three barely differentiated brands that dominate the U.S. market for vegetable oils. True, if you were to put an unmarked tasting glass of, say, Carapelli or Bertolli up against a tasting glass of Crisco canola oil, you would likely be able to identify which glass has the olive oil. But the industrial olive oil won’t taste like much of anything at all beyond a hint of olives and a decided fustiness if not out-and-out rancidity. Such industrial oils are most often created by judiciously blending bulk oils from all over the Mediterranean in order to arrive at a uniform flavor, texture, and aroma that does not differentiate one bottle from another or one year from another. The goal, in other words, is to produce a standard product that the consumer can rely on—like McDonald’s hamburgers, it will always and everywhere taste exactly the same, just like Wesson, Mazola, and Crisco.

The perceptibly fusty taste (a taste that’s familiar as the flavor of poorly processed green or black table olives) in almost all of these oils is a defect, say the experts, but it is deliberate. Fustiness comes about when olives have been fermented in a willy-nilly manner, and it is present in these industrial oils because manufacturers believe, correctly, that fustiness is a flavor the American public finds desirable in olive oil. (And not just the American public—there are untold numbers of fusty industrial olive oils on the shelves of supermarkets throughout Spain, France, and Italy, indeed throughout the world.) Yes, it may legally qualify as extra-virgin, but it has nothing to add to your kitchen or your table.

U.S. consumers spend more than $700 million annually on extra-virgin olive oil, the good, the bad, and the ugly, almost all of it imported. It’s the third largest specialty food product in the United States, after coffee and chocolate. The United States is the major market for European Union olive oils, which is to say most of the olive oil in the world. Since the publication of Mueller’s book in 2011 and its resultant publicity, however, U.S. consumers have grown ever more leery of the product, and especially—unfairly in my view—of Italian olive oil. The fact is that Italy produces some of the very finest extra-virgin olive oils in the world. That the country is also responsible for much of the fraud is equally undeniable, although Spain shares a good part of the blame.

There’s an old joke retold old too often in the olive oil world: Where is the best oil from? Answer: Spain. And where is the worst oil from? Answer: Spain. And it could be said equally of Italy or Greece, which are, along with Spain, the top suppliers of olive oil for the U.S. market.

To be fair, much of the fraud practiced by European olive oil farmers and producers has little to do with the quality of consumer products and more to do with false claims for subsidies collected from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP. Spain alone, which makes a little less than half of the world’s entire production of olive oil (and exports a little more than half[2]), receives subsidies from Brussels to the tune of a cool 40 percent of the value of its own olive oil market. This has, predictably, encouraged Spanish farmers to plant more and more olives, many in the intensive system of cultivation that was actually developed in Spain in the 1990s. Over-planting, in turn, has led quite predictably to massive over-production and a glut of Spanish olive oil. But this is not premium extra-virgin in fancy containers costing upward of $40 a liter. Think instead of the bottles stacked on your local supermarket shelves, bottles that often bear what looks like an Italian name or an Italian image on the label. Many are produced by a single Spanish multinational and filled with cheap, undated oil from the huge plantations of Andalusia. Carapelli, Bertolli, and Sasso all started out life as reputable Italian firms, but as their market grew larger and larger, they looked ever farther afield to source cheap oil. Soon they became acquired by Unilever, the massive Dutch multinational, which then sold the lot of them off to SOS, a Spanish not-quite-so massive multinational, which promptly changed its name to Deoleo, and has now joined with the Hojiblanca Group, a huge association of 90 producer cooperatives in Andalusia, to form the world’s largest olive oil company. Gresham’s Law, a historic economic dictum that goes back to very ancient times, states, in brief, that bad money drives out good. This new association, it seems certain, will dominate the market, pushing cheaply made Spanish bulk oil—and in the end, bad oil will drive out good.

This is olive oil as a commodity: produced in quantity, priced cheaply, supported by government subsidies, and intended for a growing global market to compete with canola and other vegetable oils. This is olive oil as kitchen grease, pure and simple. It should be no surprise that subsidies produce gluts, which in turn create lower prices and the need for more supports, in a continuing downward cycle that debases the identity of one of the most superb products that nature and humankind have joined together to produce. It is Gresham’s Law in its purest operation.

Earlier, I talked about the different categories of olive oil, but let me sum up once again what we can find in stores in America (and in Italy and Spain and probably elsewhere too, for that matter):

• Extra-virgin olive oil: Purported to be the highest quality of oil, produced mechanically, without chemical inputs, to standards established by the International Olive Council (see Chapter 4) and evaluated for its excellence with both laboratory testing and by a panel of IOC-certified tasters.
• Olive oil (sometimes still presented to an unwitting public as “pure” olive oil): Like extra-virgin, produced by mechanical means but because it has failed to make the extra-virgin grade, has been corrected, rectified, or refined—all three terms are used—to create a flavorless, odorless oil to which a small amount of extra-virgin oil may be added to give it some taste and aroma. I have to point out another widespread myth about olive oil, that this category is produced from a “second pressing.” Even some of the most reputable sources (such as, alarmingly, the BBC Web site) have repeated this untruth. It cannot be said often enough: With modern extra-virgin olive oil production, there is no second pressing.
• Light olive oil: Rectified or refined oil, like the previous category, that is deliberately created with very little aroma or flavor but otherwise similar to the olive oil grade—olive oil, in brief, for people who really don’t like olive oil.
• Pomace oil (aka olive-pomace oil): Cheap oil produced by extracting the small amount of oil remaining in the dregs (the pomace—pulp, skins, and pits) of olive processing, using solvents, most commonly hexane; the oil must be further rectified to remove the solvent and make it acceptable for human consumption. While technically considered edible, pomace oil is banned in some countries. In the United States, it is used, legally, in many low-end food service operations such as pizzerias. As Curtis Cord, editor of the excellent website Olive Oil Times, put it: “Pizza makers . . . simply don’t know the difference and neither do their customers.”

In this book, as I’ve stated frequently, I deal only with extra-virgin olive oil since I believe it is the only olive oil that counts, the only oil that is interesting to use, and, frankly, the only oil that is interesting to write about. All else is like kitchen grease made in such quantities solely to compete with cheap vegetable oils that do nothing for your health or your diet. But clearly extra-virgin comes in many stripes and colors too. Given the confusion of labels, most of them misleading when not downright fraudulent, what is a poor cook to do? How can buyers know when the oil they are purchasing is genuine, unadulterated, 100 percent extra-virgin? And even more important, how can they know, if it says it’s extra-virgin, that it’s actually any good?

What, in short, is the best extra-virgin olive oil? It’s a question I am often asked by worried consumers. My old pal Mort Rosenblum, an astute journalist and author of Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit, asked that same question of Juan Vicente Gomez Moya. To which the very genial Gomez Moya, then director (now retired) of the Spanish oil export organization ASOLIVA, replied: “What’s the best cheese? What’s the best wine?”—pointing out what is not always obvious, the absurdity of the question. If you stop to think for a minute or two, it becomes clear that the value of an olive oil, like the value of a cheese or of a wine, depends entirely on the uses to which it will be put. That and the personal taste of the buyer.

But there are some rules of thumb to follow when faced with the bewildering array of olive oils on offer.

First of all, don’t be seduced by cheap prices and loss leaders. I can assure you that the oil on offer unquestionably will not be very good. Unfortunately, the converse is unreliable: Just because a bottle comes at a fancy cost is no guarantee that the oil contained therein will live up to its price tag. Some of the most expensive—indeed, I dare say, the two most expensive—oils on the market are not worth the prices being asked.

Second, stay away from oil in clear glass bottles. Light is one of the greatest enemies of fine olive oil, and there is no excuse for a conscientious producer bottling his or her oil in clear glass. (The excuse offered is that “the customer likes it that way”—but consumer perceptions are changing, as well they should.) Oil should be packaged in dark glass, UV-resistant glass, or, best of all, in opaque tins.

Third, and as a corollary, don’t buy any oil, even in a tin, that has been displayed in a sunny shop window or on a high shelf under hot, bright shop lights. Even the tin will not protect the oil from eventual contamination in such situations. You could mention to the shopkeeper that it’s a disgrace to display a fine oil in such a manner—but, in my experience, the shopkeeper probably won’t welcome your advice and won’t act on it.

Fourth, read the labels: As of mid-2012, European legislation requires olive oil producers to state on the label both the origin of the olives and the place where they were processed; if and when oils from various origins have been blended together by the producer, that too must be clearly stated. I expect that olive oil producers from other parts of the world will follow suit if they have not done so already. Place of origin is no guarantee of quality, but at least if the label suggests the oil was made in Italy by Old World crofters and the print states that it actually comes from many sources around the Mediterranean, you will know better than to pay an elevated price for the stuff.

Sometimes information on the label is in excruciatingly tiny type but eventually, even if you have to use a magnifying glass, you may find a line that says: “Produced in Bari, Italy, from olives grown in Greece, Morocco, and Tunisia.” Or something similar. More conscientious producers may give you more information, such as the variety of cultivars used, the date of the harvest, and the date of bottling. Only the date of bottling, or the use-by date, which is 18 months from bottling, is at this writing required by law. Harvest date is the most relevant information of all, but only the very top producers include it on the label. Olive oil, both top-quality and industrial, is customarily kept in silos and only bottled right before it is sent to market. Thus an oil can be and often is bottled two, and sometimes even three, years after harvest. The expiration date, curiously, doesn’t go into effect until the oil is bottled. So an oil that was made in October 2011, say, might be bottled in July 2013 and carry a “use-by” date of January 2015—at which point it will be almost four years old. All perfectly legal, if demonstrably unscrupulous—as an Australian producer told me, “Two-year-old olive oil should feed the biodiesel industry.” (I don’t agree with his observation, but I get his point.)

All things being equal, an ideal label might read something like this: “Made from Koroneiki olives grown on our Astikas estate in the PDO [Protected Denomination of Origin] Kolymvari Chania, on the island of Crete. Stone-ground and milled on the estate. Harvested in November 2012 and bottled in April 2013. Certified organic.” This is an actual label from Biolea, a lovely oil produced by George and Christine Dimitriadis on their family farm in the mountains of western Crete.

But isn’t it enough that the label says “extra-virgin”? Is that not a guarantee of quality? Well, no, unfortunately. Some of the most indifferent oils on the market fall within the parameters of extra-virgin, which, after all, is a pretty loose definition. I noted earlier that 0.8 percent free oleic acid and a peroxide level of 20, the limitations set by the International Olive Council, are not in fact very stringent. Indeed, producers of fine oils that I know all over the Mediterranean would fall on their swords rather than send out an oil with those qualifications. In brief, producers of the finest oils are looking for quality markers below 0.2 percent maximum free oleic acid and around 5 or 6 for the peroxide content.

What about “first cold pressing”? The terminology is still used by many producers, both artisanal and industrial, on their labels, and it is beloved of food writers, who wax into almost orgasmic descriptions of the aromas and flavors of “first cold pressing.” But, honestly, the term has little meaning and even less value as a descriptor. All extra-virgin olive oils, in order to qualify for that grade, must come from the first extraction of the olives—and there is no other separation of oil from the fruit, unless it is the chemical treatment of the dregs that produces pomace oil, as noted previously. To be called extra-virgin, oil must be from the original, and the only, pressing of the olives. Furthermore, even to talk about “pressing” gives a misleading idea, since almost all extra-virgin oil in commerce these days is made by centrifugal extraction rather than by crushing the olives and pressing the paste. Even the few producers who still crush olives with granite stones usually extract oil from the paste by centrifugal flow rather than by pressing. Perhaps labels would be more accurate if they read “original extraction,” but unfortunately the words don’t have the same crème-de-la-crème tone as “first cold pressing.”[3]

Another quality marker that you will find on labels is “protected denomination of origin” (DOP in Italy, DO in Spain, PDO in Greece, AOC in France), a designation that is granted by EU authorities in Brussels but regulated by a particular country’s Ministry of Agriculture, working with local producers to set standards. If you’re familiar with the French wine term appellation controlée, you know that this means the product (wine, oil, cheese, or other artisanal food) is produced within a specified geographic area and certain well-defined limits. In the case of olive oil, the limits almost always include the varieties of olive that can be used and possibly the harvest dates permitted, but there will also be quality controls that go beyond what has been set up by the International Olive Council, the idea being to create a flavor profile that is particular and distinctive to a region. Tasting panels determine whether or not an oil will receive the coveted seal indicating a protected denomination of origin, and this panel test must take place each time a product is finished. In other words, just because your olive oil received the seal last year is no guarantee that its quality will be sufficient to receive the seal this year.

So, yes, a seal of controlled denomination of origin, or its less stringent counterpart, PGI (or IGP), protected geographic indication, can point you in the direction of a well-made oil. (For Denomination of Origin, all phases of production must take place within a specified geographic area; for Geographic Indication, not all phases must take place there—so you could presumably have olives grown in another region and processed in Tuscany, for instance, hardly a stout recommendation.) But keep in mind that all these designations are assigned at the time the oil is produced. What happens to that oil between the moment of production and the moment your hand reaches for it on a grocery shelf is unfortunately unknowable, and all sorts of dire things could be hiding behind that label.

So the final bit of advice for purchasing good, reliable, well-made olive oil is this: Taste. And taste. And taste. As often as you can. Not every store, by any means, will permit tasting or even think that it’s a remarkably efficient sales pitch. Some years ago, when I was in the business of selling olive oil, among other food products, I could not convince my partners that opening a bottle of a prized oil and offering a sample to customers would in any way increase sales. All they could see was the price of the opened bottle, and to their minds, it was a waste. But shops run by smart retailers, such as Market Hall Foods in Oakland, California, Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Di Palo’s in New York City, and others in other parts of the country, have learned over the years that the best way to seduce customers into buying fine oils is to first give them a taste. And encourage them to taste some more.

Another fine opportunity to taste is offered at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in the Napa Valley, where the unique OliveToLive system, developed at Villa Campestri in Italy, allows visitors to the school’s Wine Spectator Restaurant and Flavor Bar a chance to sample a selection of oils from Italy, Spain, and California, all in a state as close to immediate post-harvest freshness as is humanly possible. And if you find one or two that you especially like, you can have a bottle filled fresh from the OliveToLive machine to take home. If the system can demonstrate success, which is still uncertain at this writing, perhaps others will invest in similar methods of guaranteeing high quality and fresh flavors.

As well, there are more and more small shops dedicated to olive oil opening across the United States. In my experience, most of these are in some way offshoots of an outfit in Berkeley, California, called Veronica Foods, which provides the expertise and the oils for such places. In my experience, too, most of the olive oils come from the southern hemisphere, and while the quality is generally good, it is seldom exceptional. These are good places to get introduced to olive oil but not to experience excellence. There is, moreover, an unfortunate concentration on flavored oils (and flavored vinegars) with odd ingredients. You will never be able to understand the true taste of high-quality oil when it has been flavored with an extract of, say, Persian lime or chipotle peppers or something called “Tuscan herbs.”

In rare parts of the United States where olive oil is actually produced—and that means, to all intents and purposes, in California, although production is spreading in Texas and southern Oregon, among other less likely regions—you should be able to taste on the spot, just as you can at a winery. While this will give you a sense only of one producer’s oils, it will give you a very strong understanding of what fresh, well-made oil should taste like, especially if you can arrange this during the autumn harvest. (In California, that means late November.) Of course, best of all, for those who can afford it, is a trip to any part of the olive oil world at the time of harvest and processing, from late September until almost Christmas, depending on where in the world you are.[4] Traveling the back roads from mill to mill and from farm to farm, tasting as much as possible on the spot and in local restaurants, which almost always vaunt local production, will give you a terrific sense of the gamut of olive oil and what it can do.

And that explosive first taste of an oil fresh from the press is nothing short of a miracle. Would to god more people could experience it—the world of cheap industrial oils would quickly be wiped off the shelves.

Once you start tasting olive oil, really tasting it, you will become aware of the astonishing fact that extra-virgin olive oils come in an enormous gamut of flavors. This is what sensory scientists call a sensory profile, and they spend a great deal of time trying to figure out the profiles of various oils and how to describe them. One such description, widely used, consists of a spider graph—it looks like nothing so much as a rather lopsided spider web—that will show whether an oil is particularly bitter or spicy or has a pronounced flavor of, say, green tomatoes or citrus. Sometimes smart producers will put one of these spider graphs on a label as a way to help consumers understand before tasting what they can expect. I have to admit that I have never found these to be very helpful and in fact most of the time can’t figure them out. And relating such a spider web profile to what I find in the bottle when I taste the oil is often impossible.

Another way of describing oils, which I find much more helpful, is verbally, in terms of what they actually taste like. Most oils can be classified under three broad generalizations (and do keep in mind that we are talking about fine extra-virgins, not about light or pure olive oils):

• lightly fruity oils with a softness and delicacy to the flavor, and very mild hints of bitterness and pungency or piquancy;
• more flavorful oils, with medium fruitiness and a rounded mouthfeel, well balanced among fruitiness, pungency, and bitterness, with a clean, fresh aroma;
• intensely fruity oils, strongly flavored, with very perceptible bitterness and pungency, still well balanced but with what wine connoisseurs would call very forward flavors.

Beyond these generalizations, there is a broad range of aromas and flavors in individual oils. A lightly fruity Arbequina from Catalonia is often distinguished by fresh almond flavors, while a similarly lightly fruity Taggiasca oil from Liguria will recall ripe apples or even bananas. One slender volume in my ever-increasing library of books about olive oil has 14 pages devoted to the different cultivars and different DOP and PGI blends in Italy alone. And it only discusses a mere 38 of the more than 400 cultivars that are known to exist in the country, not all of which are in even minor production.[5]

A person could clearly become quite obsessive about the whole question of pairing specific oils with specific foods or preparations, and I think we will see more and more chefs turning to this previously ignored field in the future, as more of them become aware of the fact that high-quality extra-virgin olive oils can be almost as varied in flavor profiles as fine wines and deserve a similar attention from conscientious cooks.

As far as home cooks and consumers are concerned, playing around with the many different flavors available in olive oils can be a lot of fun. Certainly any good kitchen should have at least two oils, one for all-purpose cooking and one for critical garnishes. But it’s also good to keep in mind that for untold generations, cooks and chefs alike in Mediterranean countries have had one oil and one oil only—whatever was produced locally. This year’s oil was used for garnishing, last year’s for cooking, and that was that. So don’t get too wound up in the task of making sure you have exactly the right oil for your tomato salad and that it’s unlike the one you use for frying eggs. If you want to use the same oil for both, by all means do so. You are the final judge, and it’s your own palate that will decide.

Okay, so now you have tasted, sampled, studied, selected, and paid for your olive oil and brought it home. What happens next?

You might be tempted, if it’s an especially handsome bottle or tin, to display it proudly next to your stove, where all your guests and friends can see how astute you are in your olive oil selection.

Don’t do that!

Keep your olive oil stored in a cool, dark cupboard. The heat and lights of the kitchen are damaging to olive oil. In Tuscany, we keep our oil stored in a dark and unheated cantina (like an above-ground cellar) in stainless steel containers called fusti. In Maine, I’m lucky to have an unheated pantry where the oil is kept in tins in dark cupboards. On the counter space, in both kitchens, is enough oil for a couple of days’ use, no more, kept in closed containers. Yes, of course it’s boring to have to replenish the supply every two or three days, but better that than fine olive oil slowly deteriorating from the heat and light of a normal kitchen. Another tiresome but necessary task: Before replenishing that kitchen container, make sure it has been thoroughly drained, rinsed, and dried. The practice of simply topping up an olive oil cruet is the source of much of the rancid oil in restaurants: If the oil in the bottom of the container has already gone bad, fresh good oil added to it will quickly go bad also, contaminated by the bad oil left in the container.

One question I’m often asked: What about refrigerating olive oil? Isn’t that a good way to keep it? I can think of situations where you might consider refrigerating olive oil, but they are not many. The biggest problem with the practice is the condensation it creates inside the container. The condensation drips into the oil and the water in the oil creates problems. In the presence of moisture, fermentation takes place and mold develops. However, in a very hypothetical situation—let’s say you live in Phoenix, Arizona, you are going to be away for much of the summer, you can’t leave an air-conditioner turned on, temperatures can get well up over 90°F and stay there for days at a time—in that case, yes, I would probably refrigerate olive oil if I had no cool basement in which to leave it. But that’s an extreme state of affairs.

As for freezing olive oil, Graziano Decimi, a passionate producer who makes extraordinary olive oils all by himself on the banks of the Tiber River in Umbria, explained to me what happens when you freeze the precious substance: “It’s fine as soon as you take it out of the freezer,” he said. “But you have to use it right away because it will deteriorate rapidly.” In brief, if you wanted to preserve the fresh taste of just-made olive oil for a salad in, say, May, freeze a small quantity in November, just enough to dress that salad. Any more than what you need will not be worth the effort, as it will go bad very quickly.

And now that you have your oil properly stored and a small container (or two or three if you have, like me, multiple oils) in the kitchen, it’s time to start cooking.

How do you cook with extra-virgin olive oil?

Fearlessly!

Generously!

Use it, as home cooks and restaurant chefs do throughout the Mediterranean, for everything: sautéing, frying, stir-frying, poaching, baking, roasting, braising, as well as for garnishing both raw and cooked dishes, salads and bean soups, and eggs and tomato sauces, and with meat and fish and vegetables, and in desserts. In the next section you’ll find a selection of recipes that all require extra-virgin olive oil to be all that they can be. But I would like for the moment to assume that you are a complete novice with extra-virgin olive oil and to introduce you to a few simple things that may convince you—if you still need convincing—of the virtues of this miracle ingredient. Then, once you are convinced, you may wish to go on and try a whole variety of different olive oils with different flavors, sometimes very subtly varied, at other times quite dramatically diverse.

Keep this in mind: Olive oil can exalt particular flavors in a dish but it can also suppress undesirable flavors (too much bitterness, for instance), as well as pull flavors together to meld them into a more integrated whole. Bill Briwa, a senior chef-instructor at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, California, is a man with a true gift for assessing flavor profiles and an inexhaustible curiosity about the uses to which olive oil can be put in the professional kitchen. Chef Briwa offers an example of a Picual olive oil from Spain (he uses Castillo de Canena’s award-winning Picual) that, when added to a tomato sauce, gives new emphasis to the balance of sweetness and acidity in the sauce. Conversely, a Tuscan oil, with its natural bitterness (and here he uses Villa Campestri’s Olio di Cosimo), actually loses that bitterness when poured in a little stream over slices of a fine beefsteak grilled rare.

So let’s try a few experiments.

First of all, let’s make a very simple salad dressing, since that seems to be the most natural, most common use of extra-virgin olive oil on the American table. Take out your favorite salad bowl. Use the flat blade of a knife to crush a clove of garlic on a chopping board. Coarsely chop about half of that clove (save the other half for the next little experiment) and put it in the bottom of the salad bowl along with a half teaspoon or so of fine sea salt. Now use the bowl of a soupspoon to crush the garlic into the salt, working it together until it makes a smooth paste. Stir in three spoonfuls of your favorite olive oil and another spoonful of freshly squeezed lemon juice or a mild or aged wine vinegar, whichever you prefer. (The size of the spoon you use doesn’t matter—the important thing is the ratio of three to one, oil to acid.) Stir together, then pile rinsed and dried salad greens on top. Add whatever you wish by way of cucumbers or spring onions, radishes or tomatoes, and toss the salad ingredients in the dressing just before you bring the bowl to the table.

If you liked that (and I can’t imagine you didn’t), try it again, this time with a different olive oil, perhaps a spicier oil or a sweeter one, and compare the results. You can also play around with the mixture, adding fresh green herbs, such as basil, flat-leaf parsley, chives, chervil, tarragon, or mint; lovage is a favorite at our house. A French cook would probably stir in a small amount of fine Dijon mustard with the vinegar. A Greek cook might add a pinch of dried oregano. A Lebanese might stir in lemony-flavored sumac at the end.

I would be the first to admit that making this little mix is not quite as easy, nor quite as cheap, as opening a bottle of Wish-Bone dressing. If you use top-of-the-line Badia a Coltibuono olive oil, for instance, you will spend about $4 to dress a salad for six to eight people. (I don’t calculate the rest of the ingredients, which cost pennies.) A cheaper but still very good Sicilian oil might cost $2.50 for the same quantity. But while that Wish-Bone costs as little as 14 cents an ounce, the advantages of a fine olive oil, in flavor, in nutritional value, and in satisfaction are enormous. Just check the ingredients list: Unlike commercial dressings, the one we’ve just made together is crafted almost exclusively from fine extra-virgin olive oil, while the commercial variety is made up of water (the number one ingredient in most commercial dressings), soybean oil (number two), and sugar (usually number three). I rest my case.

Let’s try another experiment: Take a 28-ounce tin of best-quality whole canned plum tomatoes. Chop the rest of that garlic clove (or get out a fresh one) and add it to a small saucepan along with a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Set the pan over medium-low heat, and when the garlic bits have softened but not browned, add the whole tomatoes, crushing them in your hands as you add them to the pan. Leave the juices behind in the tin, in case you need to use them to thin out the sauce later. Let the sauce cook until it is very thick and the tomatoes are falling apart. Take the pan off the heat and, as soon as it has cooled a bit, use a stick blender (an immersion blender) to puree the tomatoes. If they seem very thick, add a little of the juice in the tin, but be sure to blend it in thoroughly. Now, off the heat but with the puree still hot, blend in about a third of a cup of extra-virgin olive oil, adding a couple of tablespoons at a time. Taste and add salt. Sometimes a bit of sugar is necessary to boost the flavor of canned tomatoes. You could also add a pinch of crushed dried chile pepper if you wish, or several grinds of black pepper from a mill. This will make a sauce that is unctuous, rich, and delicious, perfect for plain pasta and as good as ketchup (no, better!) to spoon over hamburgers or sliced meat loaf or grilled chicken.

One final experiment, easier than all the others:

• Step 1: Put a nice big russet potato into a 375°F oven and bake it until it is tender throughout—40 to 50 minutes should do it, depending on the size of the spud.
• Step 2: Put it on a plate and crack it open. Immediately douse it with a liberal helping of your finest extra-virgin—none of those food-writerly drizzles here, add a proper glug or two of oil. Plus a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and a couple of turns of the pepper mill.
• Step 3: Eat.

I can guarantee this will woo you away from butter and sour cream forever. One caveat, however: Nothing but the best extra-virgin will do. Any hint of rancidity or fustiness will only be emphasized by the heat of the potato.

And now, let’s move on to cooking with olive oil:

What has caused more confusion than almost anything else having to do with extra-virgin olive oil is the question of the smoke point, the point at which an oil—any oil—when heated starts to smoke and break down into glycerol and free fatty acids. Not only does a smoking oil or fat give food an unpleasant taste, but there is also a good deal of evidence that consuming such fats on a regular basis is a very unhealthy practice.

Over and over again I have been told, by earnest, well-meaning chefs and accomplished cooks alike, that “you can’t cook with extra-virgin olive oil.” This is a dictum taught in some of our finest cooking schools and repeated authoritatively in food magazines and newspaper food columns as well as on television food programs. The chorus sings almost with one voice: Regular olive oil for cooking and extra-virgin for garnishing only.[6]

Why?

Because the smoke point of extra-virgin is too low.

In fact, the chorus is wrong. It cannot be stated often enough or loudly enough: The smoke point of extra-virgin olive oil is not low. And the polyphenols in extra-virgin olive oil, which barely exist, if at all, in other oils, are a further protection against the breakdown of the oil under heat.

According to the International Olive Council (IOC), extra-virgin olive oil has a smoke point of 210°C (400°F). Other, less prejudiced experts say the smoke point is between 380° and 410°F, depending on the free acid level and the number of impurities (filtered oil is better for frying than unfiltered). Is that temperature low? I don’t think so. The Joy of Cooking, that American household bible, recommends deep-fat frying at between 350° and 365°F. That is, if you want fried food that is cooked all the way through with a golden, crisp, greaseless coating, whether it’s fish and chips, Southern fried chicken, apple fritters, or Maine fried clams. The whole purpose of deep-frying food, whether it’s floured or not, breaded or not, in a batter or not, is to create a crisp, caramelized outer shell that seals the food quickly and protects the juiciness of the interior. Think of that Southern fried chicken and the pleasure of biting through the buttermilk-flour coating to reach the tasty, warm, and succulent bits of flesh inside—at a higher temperature than 355° or 360°F, you risk burning the outside coating while the inside may still be unpleasantly raw. Alternatively, if you fry at lower temperatures, the coating will absorb a great deal of fat, it will be soggy, and it will never develop that satisfyingly rich, golden, crunchy crust.

So where does this myth about the low smoke point of olive oil originate? It’s not at all clear, but it has become ubiquitous. A corollary myth has it that somehow when you fry with olive oil it becomes a trans fat. This is physically and chemically impossible in a home or restaurant kitchen.

Most of the time, in any case, unless you’re the proprietor of Freddie’s Fabulous Fries, you will not be deep-fat frying, so there is no excuse for not using extra-virgin olive oil. But if you are the chef de cuisine at Freddie’s, one thing to keep in mind is that olive oil for frying should not be used more than twice or maximum three times, since any oil (not just olive oil) degrades with each successive heating. All cooking oils, including extra-virgin olive oil, if used over and over again at high temperatures, as for deep-fat frying, will eventually oxidize and turn rancid.

California food writer (and expert olive oil taster) Fran Gage, whose book The New American Olive Oil gives the skinny on California producers, even deep-fries perfect french fries using California extra-virgin—and there’s no reason to think other extra-virgins might not work just as well. Gage soaks the potatoes before peeling and slicing them, and soaks them again once they’ve been prepared. Then she heats the oil to precisely 380°F and away she goes. Even a little higher than that temperature, she says, will work, and the oil will definitely not smoke.

I do not suggest that you use an expensive, high-quality extra-virgin olive oil for deep-fat frying, any more than I would suggest that you use a Premier Cru Mouton Rothschild in your coq au vin. Not only would it be ridiculously expensive, but the extreme heat of frying (or of boiling) would end up destroying all the flavor complexities of both oil and wine. But a less expensive extra-virgin can be a fine choice for the occasional exercise in deep-fat frying—there are any number of Greek and Spanish oils that are reasonably priced, especially if bought in 3- or 5-liter tins, and these are excellent for the task. And extra-virgin olive oil, heated to the correct temperature before the food is added, is notably lighter and easier to digest than food fried in other fats.

All the other methods of cooking apart from deep-fat frying are also excellent ways to use extra-virgin olive oil. In this, as in so many kitchen techniques, I follow the lead of expert cooks all over the Mediterranean. Sautéing meat or fish, frying an egg for breakfast or a late-night supper, poaching a center cut of salmon, tossing steamed greens, or starting off a soup or stew or pasta sauce with that Mediterranean standby, chopped onion-garlic-carrot-celery-parsley—all call for extra-virgin olive oil, and the oil used almost always adds immeasurably to the flavor potential of the dish in question.

The late Marcella Hazan, dean of Italian cooking in America, rose to the olive oil challenge when she took to task science journalist Harold McGee, who wrote about science and food for The New York Times. McGee claimed that using extra-virgin olive oil for cooking is a waste of money, since the oil, once heated and held for a period of time, loses all its flavors. Nonsense, said Marcella; what matters is not how the oil tastes when you’re done with it but how the good flavors of a fine oil are transferred to whatever is cooked in it, whether simple vegetables, braised chicken or fish, an aromatic pasta sauce, or even a humble fried egg. “What a good olive oil transfers to the food that is cooked in it,” Hazan went on to say, “is something that only a good olive oil can bestow: aroma and depth of flavor.” Just fry an egg in extra-virgin and you’ll agree.

María José San Román is the chef-owner of a string of eating establishments in the southeastern Spanish city of Alicante—a delightful port town with a broad, palm-shaded esplanade running along the seafront. One of her restaurants has a Michelin star and another was hailed in the gastronomic press as the best tapas bar in Spain. When I first met her, María José was the Spanish saffron queen. She had made herself an advocate for locally grown saffron and was earnestly developing recipes for that brilliant spice. Since then, however, she has discovered olive oil. No, that’s wrong: María José, like all Spanish cooks, has always used olive oil. But, like most Spanish cooks, previously she used it with considerable indifference. It was for her, as we’ve said so often, kitchen grease, pure and simple.

“There’s an intensive use of olive oil all over Spain,” she said to me when I visited her in Alicante. But the quality, she admitted, was not something she had ever paid much attention to, and at that time she was using seed or vegetable oil for frying. And then she was introduced to some of the top producers of southern Spanish oil, in particular to Rosa Vañó, marketing director of the Vañó family firm, Castillo de Canena, and Mar ía José’s life, or that is to say her kitchen, changed. “Why are my calamari, my rice, my tomatoes so much better?” she asked me rhetorically, as we sat at the bar of her Taberna del Gourmet on the Alicante esplanade and munched on fried potatoes with a bowl of garlicky aioli for dipping. “I only started using olive oil to this extent two years ago,” she said, “but it has made such a difference. We have two fryers with 25 liters of olive oil each and we change them every two days. Yes, I spend more. But I can charge more too because the quality is so much greater. We live on olive oil—it’s my new religion.”

Of course, I think back to my introduction to olive oil in Spain way back in the 1960s, when the oil was uniformly rancid and the odor of frying oil from the cooking pots of my neighborhood in Madrid was overpowering every day at lunchtime. What a long way Spain has come since then, supplying much of the world with some of the finest olive oils in existence. It has been a great leap forward . . . but there is still a long, long way to go. I dream of a day when most forward-thinking consumers will understand exactly what superior extra-virgin olive oil is, how it’s made, what it tastes and smells like, and how it can be used in the kitchen and at the table. I dream of restaurants that understand the precious nature of this ingredient and how it must be treated and presented, with respect and even, perhaps, with love. And I dream of healthy children growing up with sound, wholesome diets based on Mediterranean principles of fresh food enhanced with the most nutritious, most delicious, and most interesting condiment, extra-virgin olive oil.

1. Spanish authorities have been particularly vigilant since the 1981 so-called “toxic oil scandal,” in which 1,000 people are said to have died as a result of poisoning. Despite popular misconceptions, however, the event did not involve olive oil and may in fact not have been caused by oil at all but rather by pesticide residues on Spanish-grown tomatoes. See Bob Wiffenden’s excellent analysis in The Guardian of some years ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/aug/25/research.highereducation.

2. That is to say, in a normal year Spain exports 54 percent by volume and 46 percent by value of the world’s olive oil. 2012–2013, however, was not a normal year, as long-term drought, blamed on global climate change, led to a predicted 37 percent shortfall in Spanish production.

3. It is sometimes stated that “extra-virgin olive oil” comes from the first pressing, while plain “olive oil” comes from a second pressing. As noted above, this is simply not true.

4. In the southern hemisphere (New Zealand, Australia, South America, South Africa), that would be in April and May.

5. Capano, Giuseppe, & Luigi Caricato, Olio: crudo e cotto. Caricato is also the editor of the website Teatro Naturale, which frequently discusses, in Italian and unfortunately poorly translated English, issues relating to olives and olive oil.

6. Sometimes virgin olive oil is recommended for cooking, but as we’ve seen, virgin olive oil is a category that practically does not exist in commerce.