Extra-virgin olive oil: Is it or isn't it?
MONTREAL – Its flavour and health benefits have made extra-virgin olive oil a fast-growing commodity and an essential ingredient for chefs and home cooks everywhere.
About 2.7 million tonnes of olive oil are produced every year, most of them in Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal but also in Tunisia, Morocco, Australia, South Africa and California.
On Canadian store shelves, there are more than 100 different olive oils, some selling for as much as $50 a litre, compared with canola at $2 a litre and corn oil at $3 a litre.
But how do you know what you're getting for your money?
As worldwide demand grows, olive oil fraud has become rampant. Well-known Italian olive oil producers have been found guilty of importing lesser-quality olive oil from North Africa and elsewhere, relabelling and pricing it as a high-quality extra-virgin Italian product.
Here at home, several Canadian importers have been fined for blending small amounts of olive oil with cheaper refined oils and vegetable oils and then slapping on labels that read "extra virgin" olive oil, making off with a tidy profit while cheating the consumer out of the heart-health benefits and distinctive flavour and quality they thought they were getting.
Critics say weak Canadian food labelling regulations and inadequate enforcement of those laws by federal government inspectors make buying a bottle of what Homer called "liquid gold" a tricky undertaking.
To be certified as extra virgin, each batch of olive oil must pass chemical and physical analyses in its country of origin. These measure fat content and acidity levels. There are also organoleptic tests by panels of experts who gauge colour, taste, aroma, "mouthfeel," and that particular piquant feeling olive oil leaves at the back of the mouth. Olive oils that do not meet this battery of criteria must settle for terms such as virgin, pure, pomace or refined olive oil – but not extra virgin.
Still, there are plenty of impostors.
Last year, three Canadian importers and distributors of olive oil were convicted under the Canada Food and Drug Act.
In May, the Toronto-based importer and distributor Jan K. Overweel Ltd., which markets the Emma, Casa Italia and Cortina Foods brands and other imported products, was fined $40,000 and ordered to dispose of more than 27,000 litres of seized olive oil that was labeled extra-virgin olive oil but found to be 50 per cent sunflower oil.
Last July, Eddie Zilli, president of Santa Maria Foods of Toronto, which markets Mastro olive oil and other products, was convicted of three offences under the Food and Drugs Act.
The judge ordered Zilli to pay a total fine of $150,000 and ordered 47,400 litres of seized oil to be disposed of.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) reported that Zilli unlawfully imported oil labeled as extra-virgin olive oil that was, in fact, blended oil containing approximately 50 per cent sunflower oil. The offences occurred between January and April 2006.
Two complaints by consumers about bottles labeled as 100 per cent pure extra-virgin olive oil at a supermarket in Toronto led to a conviction in September, resulting in a $7,500 fine for Italian Products Distribution Inc. Inspectors seized 400 bottles of oil, sent samples to a lab for analysis and found that they contained "a high concentration" of sunflower and/or soybean oils.
But with 2,200 food inspectors working across Canada overseeing imported food as well as monitoring a wide gamut of food products in processing plants, at border crossings and at supermarkets, warehouses and ports, a lot of illegal activity is bound to go undetected, experts say.
"Where there's the opportunity for economic gain, there will be those trying to make a buck," says Ben Roffey, the CFIA's acting manager of compliance, in a telephone interview.
CFIA spokesman Guy Gravelle says the agency has "taken action" on 19 complaints about olive oil received from consumers and competitors since January 2008. In those cases, importers or retailers were required to present certificates of authenticity, or change their labeling. In some cases, the importers were issued warning letters, in others the olive oil was ordered recalled from store shelves and in other cases, fines were levied.
Gravelle said new extra-virgin olive oils on the market as well as those that seem "unreasonably inexpensive," or those from countries where drought or other environmental factors are known to have hindered recent harvests are prime targets for investigators. So are those from importers with a previous history of breaking the law.
only one in North America accredited by the International Olive Oil Council to conduct in-depth analyses of suspicious oils.
But olive oil aficionados suspect the fraud is rampant.
The words extra virgin on a bottle of oil can allow the producer to hike the price tenfold, and that's a big attraction to people looking to make a quick buck, says Claudia Pharand, co-owner with Daniele Beauchamp of the Olive & Olives chain of four Montreal boutiques selling high-end olive oil, mostly from Spain.
IGA, though, sells extra-virgin olive oil for as little as $8.79 a litre under its house brand, Compliments. It's not artisanal, but it's authentic, says Anne-Hélène Lavoie, a spokesperson for Sobeys Quebec Inc., the national grocery chain that owns Quebec's IGA supermarkets.
The chain buys all its extra-virgin olive oil from Italy, where it is also bottled, in a factory accredited by the Italian government and an Italian olive oil producers' association.
Sobeys also pays an independent laboratory to conduct surprise visits and take random samplings of oil at the bottling factory.
Montreal chef Graziella Battista loves the way extra-virgin olive oil so perfectly dresses a salad of mixed greens, pine nuts and shaved Parmesan cheese, how it enhances the flavour of a slow-simmered ragu and makes pan-seared scallops glisten.
Battista, whose Old Montreal restaurant, named Graziella, serves rustic but elegant northern Italian fare, goes through gallons and gallons of extra-virgin olive oil in a week.
"There's not a dish that goes out of my kitchen that wasn't cooked or tossed or drizzled with olive oil," she says.
Recently, Battista was invited by a Quebec consumer magazine to be part of an expert panel that spent four days tasting nearly four dozen extra-virgin olive oils sold in local grocery stores. Battista says some of the samples were nicely flavoured, while others tasted downright nasty.
"It was a real eye-opener. There are so many products on store shelves that people shouldn't be buying," she said in an interview.
"It was as if they were expired, or something had gone wrong in the processing," she said. "And with others, you could tell right away that they were not pure olive oil. They had been blended.
Olive oil fraud is a concern around the world.
A 2007 report by RAI, the Italian television broadcaster, tracked a shipment of chemically refined low-grade olive pomace oil produced in Turkey. Mysteriously, when the oil left the Turkish port, en route to Italy, it bore extra-virgin certification.
In March 2007, in what was dubbed Operation Golden Oil, Italian authorities tested oils from more than 757 olive oil producers and found that more than 200 of them were blending their oil. Two dozen arrests were made and 85 farms were confiscated. The investigations revealed a large-scale scheme to relabel oils from other nations as Italian oil.
Another operation a month later brought 40 more arrests in northern and southern Italy. The suspects were found to be adding chlorophyll, the green pigment from plants, to otherwise colourless sunflower and soyabean oils and selling it as extra-virgin olive oil, both in Italy and abroad. More than 25,000 bottles of the falsely labelled blended oil were seized and ordered destroyed. The extensive fraud prompted the Italian government to introduce labelling laws that require bottlers to declare the olive farm's address and the country of origin of the olives on each label.
And last July, the European Union toughened up its rules, making origin labelling compulsory for virgin and extra-virgin olive oil.
Finding a fraud requires real sleuth work. Even among authentic extra-virgin olive oils there are wide variations in colour, taste and aroma, depending on where the olives grew, when they were harvested and even the weather that year.
Stan Bacler has been dubbed Canada's "olive-oil detective." He's the national manager for the CFIA's food chemistry laboratory program. For decades, he worked as head chemist in the agency's fats and oils labs, looking for clues to olive-oil adulteration.
It can take six weeks to run one series of tests, at a cost of about $1,100. In one test, chemists beam ultraviolet light at the oil. In another, they identify fatty acids by separating them from the oil. Bacler, reached in Ottawa, says his labs can't handle more than about 100 samples a year.
Scientists have an arsenal of sophisticated new tests at their disposal to spot fakes. But it's a constant battle to stay ahead of unscrupulous manufacturers developing new ways to conceal their fraud, Bacler says.
Sunflower oils from genetically modified plants, for example, are extremely hard to spot. And many vegetable oils are now modified to look and taste like olive oil, with a chemical composition closer to olive oil. That makes them harder to detect in an illicit blend.
What to look for on your olive-oil label? 1. Look precisely for the words extra virgin. Not pure or light, or olive oil. 2. Made in Italy means the oil was bottled there. Makes sure the olives were grown there, too. 3. The best olive oils are bottled at the estate where the olives grew. The label should bear the address. 4. Extra virgin olive oil is best within two years. Look for the best before date on the label or (as seen here) underside of the can.
MONTREAL – They come in beautiful glass bottles with elegant labels. Classic, they read. Pure, organic, delicate-tasting.
bottled. Some are light and fruity, others full-bodied with a peppery finish. The prices range from $7 a 500 mL bottle to $80 for a 5-litre can.
But what's what? Buying olive oil is bewildering and befuddling for even the most savvy shoppers.
"Until people taste good olive oil, they often don't know what it should taste like," says Claudia Pharand, who offers olive-oil tasting workshops at the Olive & Olives boutiques, which she co-owns with Daniele Beauchamp, specializing in high-quality estate-bottled olive oils from Spain, Portugal, Greece, Tunisia and Morocco.
Council can say without a doubt which oils are high quality extra virgin, the queen of oils.
Tasting olive oil is part art, part science. But there are a few ways to reduce the risk of buying bad oil.
Use your senses. Olive oils differ in colour and taste depending on a whole range of factors, among them: the kind of olive they were made from, where they came from, what time of year they were harvested, the weather and the equipment used in pressing.
Colour itself is no indicator of quality. Hand-picked under-ripe olives render oil of a deep green colour, while mature olives make oil of a paler colour.
But whether they are green or gold-hued, most extra-virgin olive oils have a certain depth of colour, compared with refined oils and seed oils, which are pale or almost colourless.
Smell and taste are often excellent indicators of quality and freshness. Only buy olive oil labels you already know to be authentic, or shop at smaller retailers where store staff are knowledgeable, and where sampling is part of the transaction.
Cheap-quality oils and fakes lack the freshness of aroma and the fruity taste and the bitter, but not disagreeable, spiciness that the pit of the olive imparts to the oil in pressing.
Too bitter, though, and no fruitiness, means the oil probably came from a bad crop or olives that were not pressed soon enough after harvest.
An off-smell that is dusty or slightly metallic is the tell-tale sign of an oil made from improperly handled olives, or an old oil that has been in storage, either on store shelves or in a warehouse somewhere, long past its best-before date. Or it may have been improperly stored, in contact with direct sunlight or exposed to fluctuations in temperature.
"Mouthfeel" is another term professional tasters use to describe a food's physical and chemical interaction in the mouth, the tactile sensation it leaves in the mouth and on the tongue. A premium oil feels buttery and silky in the mouth, not heavy and greasy.
Read the label. Make sure it says "extra-virgin olive oil." Extra virgin means the oil is the juice of the first pressing of the olives. No chemicals or heat will have been used in the process. And right after extraction the oil will have been sent to a local laboratory for chemical analysis and tasting tests by a panel of experts. extra-virgin olive oil has a free acidity, expressed as oleic acid, of not more than 0.8 grams per 100 grams.
Watch out for terms such as "light tasting" and "pure" and "classic." These are not official designations, but marketing terms. They are most often used by large industrial manufacturers to describe refined and blended olive oils, sometimes from subsequent pressings of olive pomace, the by-product of the first press. They are fine for cooking and baking, but otherwise lack character. They are also lower in nutritional value. There are blander blends cut with vegetable oils created to appeal to the North American palate and are rarely extra virgin.
Check the best-before date. All good-quality olive oils carry it somewhere on the container, either on the label or on the bottom of the can, even though it is not required under Canadian food labeling guidelines. The International Olive Oil Council recommends that extra-virgin olive in unopened containers be consumed within two years. After that, its health benefits and fresh aroma and taste are compromised.
Don't be shy to ask retailers for certificates. Reputable importers require certificates from their suppliers detailing the results of chemical and organoleptic tests, the name and address of the estate at which the oil was bottled, etc. And they pass these on to retailers. The clerk at the supermarket probably can't help with this, but staff in smaller stores specializing in olive oil will know what you are talking about.
Insist on traceability. Look for the producer's name and address on the label. That's a good indication the oil was produced at the grove from olives grown there. Pharand says it's also a sign that the producer has nothing to hide.
Look for pedigree. That's the advice of Favuzzi, the importer.
In Italy, it's DOP, which stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta (protected designation of origin). The French equivalent is the Appellation d'origine protégée (AOP) and the Spanish is Denominacion de Origen (DO).
These designations for wines, cheese, olive oils and several other foods are bestowed by the European Union, based on rigorous standards that ensure that the foods were produced in the areas under tightly controlled conditions. Only 39 olive growing areas in Italy carry the designation; 10 in Greece and 20 in Spain. Favuzzi says these designations are the best way to guarantee that the oil was made in the stated region, with olives from that region and using native varietals and traditional production techniques.
Each bottle comes with a serial number that leads right back to the olive grove.
Sample, research, read, explore. The only way to know what qualities you like in olive oil is to try them.
Favuzzi's company has produced a coding system, not unlike the Société des Alcools' colour code for wines, to help tasters pair olive oils and food. These codes are found on store shelves where his oils are sold.
If you really want to get into it, learn the lingo.
Finding the right vocabulary to describe a complex food like olive oil is essential to understanding and expressing what you like and don't like, as well as understanding what the oil is supposed to taste like.
Professional tasters use a wheel with 72 terms to describe an olive oil's characteristics. For example, to describe smell and taste they might use the words bitter, harsh, salty, yeast, chili peppers, hay, almond and coconut. An olive oil can feel thick, sticky or throat-catching.
A nice Tuscan Frantoio, for example, is described as being "perfumed" while an olive oil from Spanish picual olives is said to have a "tomato leaf" character.
International Olive Oil Council standards.
But woody, dry hay, earthy, cucumber and humid are negative.
Olive & Olives has three upcoming olive oil tastings and workshops. They are being held Wednesday, and April 20 at 7 p.m. at the boutique at 1389 Laurier St. E., and on April 28 at 7 p.m. at the store 428B Victoria Ave. in St. Lambert. Cost is $35 per person, plus tax. Private group workshops are also available.
Very interesting article, thank you! You state that "Only 39 olive growing areas in Italy carry the designation". Could you list these areas?