Olive oil is a staple in Mediterranean cooking, so make it your default fat when cooking foods inspired by Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, North African, and Middle Eastern cuisines. It shines as a medium for everything from soups and pastas to braises, roasted meats, and vegetables. Use it as a main ingredient in mayonnaise, vinaigrette, and all manner of condiments from Herb Salsa to chili oil. Drizzle it over beef carpaccio or baked ricotta as a seasoning.
Your food will taste good if you start with a good tasting olive oil, but choosing the right one can be daunting. At my local market alone, there are two dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil on display. Then there are all the virgin, pure, and flavored oils. Early in my cooking career, as I approached these aisles, I often found myself overwhelmed by choices: virgin or extra-virgin? Italy or France? Organic or not? Is that olive oil on sale any good? Why is one brand $30 for 750 milliliters while another is $10 for a liter?
As with wine, taste, not price, is the best guide to choosing an olive oil. This might require an initial leap of faith, but the only way to learn the vocabulary of olive oil is to taste, and pay attention. Descriptors like fruity , pungent , spicy , and bright might seem confusing at first, but a good olive oil, like a good wine, is multidimensional. If you taste something expensive but don’t like it, then it’s not for you. If you find a ten-dollar bottle that’s delicious, then you’ve scored!
While it’s a challenge to explain what good olive oil tastes like, it’s fairly simple to describe a bad one—bitter, overwhelmingly spicy, dirty, rancid—all deal-breakers.
Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead, use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter? If so, it’s rancid. The sad truth is that most Americans, accustomed to the taste of rancid olive oil, actually prefer it. And so, most of the huge olive oil producers are happy to sell to us what more discerning buyers would reject.
Olive oil is produced seasonally. Look for a production date, typically in November, on the label when you purchase a bottle to ensure you are buying a current pressing. It will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine! (In this way, olive oil is nothing like wine.)
As with salt, there are various categories of olive oils—everyday oils, finishing oils, and flavored oils. Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavor of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavored olive oils with caution. Flavorings are often added to mask the taste of low-quality olive oils, so I generally recommend staying away from them. But there is an exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press. At Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco, one of the most popular sundaes features bergamot agrumato drizzled over chocolate ice cream. And it is delicious!
It can be difficult to find a good, affordable everyday olive oil in grocery stores. My standbys include the extra-virgin oils from Seka Hills, Katz, and California Olive Ranch. Another good everyday oil is the Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco, which regularly scores well on independently administered quality analyses. In their absence, look for oils that are produced from 100 percent Californian or Italian olives (as opposed to those with labels that simply read “Made in Italy,” “Packed in Italy,” or “Bottled in Italy,” which imply that the oil is pressed in Italy from olives whose provenance cannot be traced or guaranteed). The production date should always be clearly marked on the label.
If you can’t track down a good, affordable everyday olive oil, instead of using a lower-quality one, make your own blend of good olive oil and a neutral-tasting cold-pressed grapeseed or canola oil. Save the pure stuff and use it as a finishing olive oil for salads and condiments.
Once you find an olive oil you love, take good care of it. Constant temperature fluctuations from a nearby stove or daily brushes with the sun’s rays will encourage olive oil to go rancid, so store it somewhere reliably cool and
dark. If you can’t keep it in a dark place, store olive oil in a dark glass bottle or metal can to keep light out.