Non-food industries are rife with instances in which the quality of their product took exponential jumps because of technological improvements. I know that skateboarding did with the introduction of a new material from which to make skateboard wheels. Food (think cheeses, salamis, preserves, anchovies, table olives) is often at its best when technology keeps its nose out of the kitchen, so to speak. Olive oil is an exception. With olive oil, it was the introduction of a piece of machinery that had not been used throughout olive oil's multi-millenium history, the centrifuge, which truly unleashed its flavors.

As I talk to people who tell me about olive oil they bought in the United States in the 70s or 80s, I must admit that I write off their palates in regard to olive oil if they tell me they enjoyed it as some gourmet product. I don't know what they used, but I can guarantee it didn't have the range and depth and complexity of flavor one can find in olive oils today in America.

At any point along the path of an olive, from initial fruiting on the tree where a little bug called an olive fly can claim it as a birthing center, to plucking it from the tree where bruising and skin breakage can start the rapid loss of flavors associated with oxidation, none is so poised to degrade flavors as the point of crushing and mashing and pressing of the olive to remove the oil.

Before I delve much deeper, let me first toss away a myth about olive oil: any solids left in the oil speed that oil toward rancidity and loss of flavors. However romantic that bottle of unfiltered oil with a smear of olive solids at the bottom may be, those solids are introducing extra playgrounds for oxidation to occur. If a bottle of unfiltered, undecanted olive oil is on the shelf, is over 4 months old, and can't be tasted, then just assume it's crap; you'll save yourself some money.

The old-fashioned way of making olive oil, in which a big granite stone cylinder circled within a massive bowl, crushing olives into a pulpy, warm mash, was messy. Let's start with those big granite stones. Those are hard to clean. Once the mash was at the right consistency, the cotton circular mat that the mash was spread upon also got really messy. It got even messier when a whole stack of those cotton mats were put on top of each other and pressed really hard to get the oil and olive water out. At the start of the season's pressing, the mats were almost inevitably cleaner than at the end of the pressing season, no matter the fine intentions of the producers in cleaning those mats. Any residue left on the mats or the stones during this process as the season progressed grew more and more detrimental to the flavor of the oil, and even more so any residue that may have existed from a less than perfect cleaning from the previous year.

Before centrifuges existed, large decanters were used after the pressing to hold the olive water, the bits of solids, and the oil. Time would do its trick of separating oil and water, and voila, olive oil. That time to decant also meant more time for the olive oil to sit in contact with water and olive solids to degrade through both fermentation and oxidation.

When centrifuges came into the picture, they had a triple bonus factor to them. A producer could hook a pump from the mash to the centrifuge and turn what had been a staggered process that kept mash sitting around, waiting to be spread onto cotton mats (and degrading in flavor because of sitting), into a continuous, uninterrupted process. The centrifuges, being smooth, metal, and non-porous, were easy to keep antiseptically clean. The centrifuges, unlike gravity decanting, were fast at separating out the oil from the solids. Triple bonus: continuous, easy cleaning, and fast. And expensive.

There's the rub. Some poorer countries and estates that make wonderful olive oil can't afford to make the technological investment into centrifuges. People come to me all the time saying I should investigate this country or that country's olive oil because it's delicious and 1/3 the price. I won't disrespect their country, but the oil will only be delicious for a fraction of the time of producers who can afford the technology; it'll be delicious for the first few months in that country, but not for the six to eighteen months required to successfully export to U.S. retail shelves.

Diving into the weeds of this a bit, the centrifugation I'm speaking of has only existed since the early 1990s. A method of using centrifuges existed before that which required thinning the mash with extra water, and resulted in stripping some of the flavor out of the oil because of that water bath the mash had to take. In some circles, centrifugation got a bad name because losing the integrity of the flavor of the oil wasn't worth the triple bonus. With the current method, the issue is more likely to be too much flavor left in the oil compared to traditional methods, to which I can only respond with wonder and disbelief.

What's this all mean for the consumer? One, countries new to olive oil production (all countries outside of the Mediterranean) are going to be using this. New olive oil estates aren't created using outdated cotton presses, not if they're sending a bottle to a retail store. Two, if the olive estate is Mediterranean, but a relatively new estate (say a boutique buy of some American who wants to own an olive orchard in Provence), it's probably using centrifuges. Truth be told, most olive oil from the big three, Spain, Italy, and Greece, are probably using centrifuges if they're exporting to the U.S. Unfortunately, you can still make bad olive oil from centrifuges, just not as easily as traditional methods.

Beyond that, the purpose of my sharing this knowledge is two-fold. First, it illustrates the pure marketing BS around the terms first-pressed and cold-pressed. They mean no more than "natural" or "like homemade;" lacking any legal definition in the United States. They are anachronistic terms that play off of the ignorance of the consumer. If it says first-pressed or cold-pressed and it's not some $50 boutique olive oil from centuries-old trees under the care of some stubborn Tuscan, then laugh at it. Olive oil is rarely pressed these days. Two, I needed to explain centrifuges and rancidity (a previous post of mine) to set the stage for a future post on the lifecycle of olive oil production (otherwise titled, "Why Do I Have To Pay $30 For Good Oil?).