While there are equally delicious olive oils being made everywhere from well-known countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, to less-thought-of places like California, Chile, and Australia, bigger industrial producers tend to mix a bunch of different strains together (even if they’re all technically extra-virgin). (Neither Lycopolus nor Jenkins will buy bottles that have been stored on the top shelf of a grocery store.)įinally, Jenkins says, you can look for the olive varietal or the estate on which the olives were grown and pressed. Light, heat, and oxygen are all enemies of olive oil, meaning your best bet is that the liquid gold is contained in a dark glass or entirely opaque bottle, ideally not made from plastic or a non-stainless-steel type of metal, and stored away from windows or industrial lights. (Expiration dates can actually be misleading they’re measured from bottling, which means it’s possible the oil sat around for a long time before then.)Īnother key indicator of freshness is bottle color and material. Olive oil is a fruit juice, and as such, it gets dull-tasting around 12 months, and has certainly gone bad by 18 months. Within the extra-virgin category, there are a few ways to find the good stuff. But the bottom line is that extra-virgin contains “no defects” from picking, to processing, to bottling. The threshold for olive oil to be extra-virgin is intense (it involves laboratory tests, and is, in fact, the only edible commodity in the world to also involve human taste tests). If you see a bottle only marked “olive oil,” that means it’s been treated and refined, the subtleties of taste disappearing entirely. To start, you should only be buying extra-virgin olive oil, as both Emily Lycopolus, olive oil sommelier and author of The Olive Oil and Vinegar Lover’s Cookbook, and Nancy Harmon Jenkins, cook and author of Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil, told me. In talking to them, I learned that following several basic guidelines will get you most of the way to buying a solid bottle. Some boast that they’re “extra-virgin,” and others say “pure” or “refined.” The sheer number of options gives me decision fatigue - which is why I consulted a group of 15 experts to narrow it down to some of the tastiest, most reliable options on the market. Some are small with high price tags, others are bigger at a reasonable cost. Some hail from Greece, others from California, others still from Italy. Even as someone who cooks the vast majority of her meals at home and goes through a lot of olive oil every week, I find that section of the grocery store overwhelming.
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