Agromafia
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
>They were included in a blind taste test by those experts in Rome. The process is as tightly orchestrated as a Verdi opera. Blue glass hides the oil's color. Separate cubicles prevent cheating.
>The panel would not say they were adulterated - but they agreed two brands we purchased back home did not come within a sniff of extra virgin. They described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand happens to be one of the best-selling in America.
Fascinating. I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil. Odds are that the extra virgin olive oil from a supermarket is just some other oil with some chlorophyll added for coloring.
Buy Greek extra virgin. Guaranteed flavor and quality. Italians buy it to raise the quality of theirs. In Greece 80% of virgin oil production is extra virgin. In Italy it's less than 50%, while in Spain less than 20%.
Here's one for example: http://www.amazon.com/Iliada-Extra-Virgin-Olive-Liter/dp/B00...
Just a note: After wikipedia in 2013, world production of virgin olive oil was 2.8 million tonnes. Spain produced 1.1 million tonnes, or 39% of world production in this year whereas in Greece the production of virgin olive oil was only 0.31 million tonnes. Therefore, please note that with your data both countries will produce almost the same amount of liters of extra virgin in fact.
If you find that in Spain less than 20% of the virgin olive oil is extra, this is a good thing, not bad. Means that if you read "extra virgin" in the tag is top quality. Only the best of the best can be tagged as extra virgin (More than 80% of the candidates are eliminated in the process). Of course, the controlled and 'low' production is also a marketing strategy to keeping prices of this premium product always high. Spain could produce much more bottles of extra virgin if they wanted to do so.
After wikipedia: Extra-virgin olive oil accounts normally for less than 10% of oil produced (extra-virgin + virgin + refined + pomace) so to find extra-virgin produced in California should be currently difficult, but the percentage is 80% in Greece, 65% in Italy and 50% in Spain and is not difficult to find in the european markets. Is just that is not cheap.
And no, I did NOT receive this product at a discount in return for an unbiased review :-)
A litre will cost you 12-15 Euros, but it really worths the price. In a supermarket you will ( almost ) never be able to buy that kind of quality. Mostly due to the fact that a large number of people do not know the real taste and will qualify the real extra virgin as "bad" and thus will not sell and secondly why not sell something low quality that is traditionally expensive (10+ euros /L ) with a big margin?
Can Costco do no wrong?
I have NEVER had extra virgin olive oil that looked like that or tasted any and had that reaction. Have I been really using fake olive oil all this time?
Good olive oils are a little bitter, very grassy and quite distinct; the less flavor they have the more likely they've been diluted with cheap oils, while the taste of table olives is a mark of rancidity.
Also, if you haven't had true aged balsamic, get a small bottle sometime and try it on berries or good bread. The stuff you buy in the store is like petroleum waste in comparison.
In a blind (but not double-blind) taste test between it and supermarket-bought "extra virgin" Italian "olive" oil (supposedly adulterated with hazelnut oil), there was absolutely no contest. The difference was glaringly obvious. You could detect the difference just from the odor wafting through the air as I put the spoons down on the plate.
Similar experience with Balsamic vinegar. The supermarket imitation balsamic vinegar, compared to multiple-barrel-aged balsamic-style vinegar, or even the genuine Balsamic vinegar from Modena, is very different. Same deal for regular feed-trough butter vs. pasture-fed butter. The "real" thing, whatever it is, is usually 2x-4x as expensive as the industrial-scale stuff, though. So it's usually worthwhile to get both, and save the expensive stuff for when quality matters most.
It's very hard to do a fair blind taste test when the testers know without a doubt which sample is which, even when actually blindfolded--makes it impossible to remove prejudicial biases such as "more expensive equals tastes better" or "traditional process equals tastes better" or "nostalgic appeal equals tastes better".
Grass fed beef has a distinctly gamey-er taste than corn fed, I've found. At least if the grass fed beef I've bought is actually grass fed.
On a historic note, early American farmers planted pumpkins for their cows to eat, which made the butter darker, from all the carotene. A lot of herds still get the leftover trash from pumpkin farms after Halloween.
I actually struggle to find light olive oil in stores, which used to be more of a standard I used for light sauteing, etc. I wonder how much of the dilution is based on the over strong demand for the stuff. and lack of definition of "extra virgin" by the US market? The article mentions it must be from the first press of olives, is this a labeling law in the US?
I use California virgin oils for sautéing, which has worked out pretty well. As you say, the better Californians and European EVOOs are best left as table oils.
Just wait until you taste the real stuff. You can buy it on amazon. It's very much worth the price.
Also, related reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zcpt4/til_u...
It isn't hard. Just generally, its around $40 a bottle.
Most people buy stuff with similar labels at $7-10 a bottle and think its the same because it claims to be EVOO as well.
It's quite telling that the amount of "extra virgin" "Italian" "olive" oil exported from Italy is not only greater than the amount of actual virgin oil that its olive orchards could theoretically produce, but also greater than the amount of olive oil Italy actually produces, for all grades. It is either cut with a different oil, or it is imported from elsewhere (Greece, Spain) and re-exported.
That quote seems a little self-fulfilling. If you asked a butcher to eat 3 hamburgers, one from Ruby Tuesdays, one from McDonalds and one from In-n-out. Do it a blind taste test just small samples of the meet. Would you be shocked to learn that the cheapest and worst tasting was also the best-selling in the United States?
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...
Nevertheless, you can still sell individually wrapped American "pasteurized processed cheese food" slices in all states, even those with well-developed dairy herds. As far as I know, those things are produced with petroleum distillates and plasticizer chemicals. It's sort of sad that the stuff colloquially known as "American cheese" is not even allowed to be marketed as cheese according to the U.S. government definition of cheese.
It may surprise you to know that some Americans actually do know the difference between mozzarella made from buffalo (not bison) milk, mozzarella made from whole cow milk, and mozzarella made from part-skim cow milk. We just can't afford the premium to buy the good stuff, so supermarkets don't carry very much whole cow milk cheese, and never the imported buffalo milk stuff.
It's not that we can't tell the difference between Colby, Cheshire, Gloucester, mild Cheddar, and extra-sharp Cheddar. We just usually don't care enough to pay more for one in preference to another.
The key addition is an emulsifier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_cheese#Advantages
(cue tptacek raving about sodium citrate)
I guess such things might be derived from petroleum, but in that case it would be highly purified and identifiable by a single chemical name (so no need to give it a more general label like petroleum distillates).
The emulsifier does enable the addition of other milk byproducts and oil and such, but there's no reason to suggest that the bulk of the material in processed cheese is anything other than milk products.
I always refer to American bison (Bison bison) as bison rather than buffalo, and rarely refer to African buffalo or Asian water buffalo at all.
It is unlikely that anyone would make cheeses from bison milk, as their udders are quite small, and you are likely to get kicked in the head or gored before getting your bucket close enough. Bison herds are very defensive towards their nursing calves, especially with wolves, bears, or humans around.
The African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) will not just kick your ass. They will kill you, even if you don't show up with a milking bucket. Their herds will engage in revenge killings against lions, and are considered one of the most dangerous animals on the continent, killing (as a species) hundreds of humans every year.
So by elimination, that leaves the domesticated water buffalo as the only "buffalo" that you could safely milk to make cheese.
One such ingredient was lemons. He used to travel regularly to Sicily where he would sit down with the local Mafia families and try to negotiate huge lemon juice contracts. They would trot out some juice and he would taste it and perform various chemical tests. His first time doing this he decided they had excellent juice and ordered all the juice they could produce that season, but when the full shipment arrived and he tested it in London he found it was fake lemon juice - water with citric acid and some other crap.
So he goes back to Sicily to sit down with these families again. This time he tells them: I have authority to spend more money on lemons than anyone else in the world. I'm also a better chemist than anyone you could possibly employ. I'm buying the same amount again, but this time I'm testing every tank before it boards the ship. We get the best you've got this time, and every time in future. If anything is off, we're never buying lemons in Sicily again.
He said he half expected to disappear that night, but instead the next day he got VIP treatment at the dock while he and his team tested every single tank of juice, and it was all perfect. For the rest of his career GSK got top quality lemon juice. After he died my grandmother received several letters from his contacts in Sicily, thanking him for being fair and honest.
The sad thing is that it's the locals who really get fucked over in these scenarios: they fear the Mafia and their livelihoods are totally under their control.
I suspect the problem is somewhat overstated - to me it sounded like the tasters believed the olive oils were lower-grade, but without a rigorous definition of what that is it's hard to say how big the problem is.
Personally, I buy the lower-grade EVOO for sautéing. I'm going to be disappointed if it's really just olive oil with chlorophyll added, but at the same time I'm not looking for high-grade stuff when I buy a $10 bottle of oil. It would be a waste for what I'm doing with it.
In the other side, this is again a problem of uneducated consumers. People don't know currently what mean concepts like bread or milk. Seriously the real taste of milk is totally different to the watermilk/waterchalk that we drink currently. You buy cheap and by unknown brands, you'll have a cheap product.
I can't talk by Italy, but in Spain this is a serious market. If some brand would be tempted to sell fake olive oil mixed with other oils as pure virgin olive oil directly to the final consumer [1] the competence, consumer's associations and the government would eat it raw in five minutes. Olive oil sold to consumers can not contain sunflower and of course not the infamous canola oil. The idea to mixing rapeseed and olive oils and selling it as pure olive oil will be outrageous in Spain.
We need to remember that in 1981 more than 20.000 spaniards where poisoned by scammers selling fake canola oil. Many died and other suffered permanent nervous damage for the rest of their lives. It was a really bitter lesson and the market is strongly regulated since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spain_rapeseed_oil_toxici...
[1] Everybody can expect to have sunflower oil, palm and also canola in their favourite brand of potato chips or cookies, but is advertised as vegetable oils. You can mix olive oil with other edible oils as long as you tell the consumer what is eating and we do not joke about it; Pepsico was fined in 2003 for fake advertising with a brand of 100% olive oil fried potato chips. Other company quickly unclosed that the real content of olive oil was the 2%, brought the brand to trial and won.
This guy owned the trees, pressed the olives and bottled it himself. It was the best stuff I ever tasted. He quit calling years ago; I miss him.
Our Ratings show that you don’t need to buy oil with an Italian heritage to experience the best. California, which produces about 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., is the source of the only two products judged Excellent: McEvoy Ranch (grown on a 550-acre property in Petaluma) and Trader Joe’s California Estate oil (“crafted to our specifications from the first press of Arbequina olives grown on estate ranches in the Sierra foothills”), which costs far less than McEvoy: 35 cents per ounce compared with $1.73.
Three of the six Very Good oils also have a California pedigree: B.R. Cohn, 365 Everyday Value (Whole Foods), and California Olive Ranch. O-Live & Co. is pressed from Chilean olives. Only Lucini Premium Select and Kirkland Signature (Costco) Select Toscano are from olives grown in Italy. The other rated products contain olives from a mix of nations, such as Argentina, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey. Goya, a winner in our tests years ago, scored only a Fair this time around.
>It's not great
Well, what is a great brand, then?
California Olive Ranch is a fine brand because, as far as I know, they can be trusted. That's the only reason why a brand even matters. They're members of the California Olive Council.
EDIT
If you're on west coast, I'd be curious to know the harvest date listed on your bottle.
Even experts after training will have a hard time, there are some studies out there where sommeliers didn't notice they got white wine with red food colouring.
What's going on here is basically like cutting butter with oil. Yeah, you probably won't notice at 10%, but you will definitely notice at 50%.
I've gone through a couple bottles and was not disappointed.