I'll bet I could ask a hundred people to describe the flavor of olive oil and only one or two could give me an answer.

What do you think it should taste like?

We'll begin to explore the answer to that right after the jump.

A mantra that will be readily known by attendees of my classes is that olive oil is just fruit juice. I say that to demystify the making of olive oil, to help illustrate how simple olive oil really is, to differentiate it from corn oil or rapeseed oil or sunflower oil or soybean oil or most other cooking oils which require a lot of processing and chemicals to extract their oil. If someone holds a raw olive and crushes it in their hand, it will cease to be any more of a mystery how to get oil out of an olive than to get juice out of a cherry. But that mantra of mine doesn't help to understand the proper taste of olive oil.

If I ask what good apple juice should taste like, or even good carrot juice, the easy and proper answer is that they should taste like a good apple or a good carrot. However, the only creatures that are going to appreciate the flavor of an olive are bugs and birds. The last thing anyone wants olive oil to taste like is a fresh olive. If you tasted a fresh olive it would be akin to taking a swig of vanilla extract to find out what vanilla tastes like.

See, olives have three components, the olive pit, which is almost completely flavorless, the olive oil, and the olive water. Olive water is one of the most bitter things you will ever taste, a taste that will stay in your mouth unwanted for ten to twenty minutes after you take a tentative bite of a fresh olive. No one wants olive oil to "taste like an olive."

Olive oil has three primary "good" tastes: bitterness, pungency (or pepperiness), and fruitiness. Fruitiness can vary from nutty to grassy, from apple-like to artichoke-like; it's the part of the taste of olive oil which one reaches for fresh fruit and vegetable comparisons in order to describe. The intensity of those three flavors can be quite mild or very strong, but they should be in harmony with each other.

I'll talk about what olive oil should not taste like, what the "bad" flavors are, and how they relate to the definition of "extra virgin" in one of the next installments.