Notes on Olive Oil

The most useful thing anybody ever told me about olive oil is that you need two of them, and that spending a lot on the one you cook with is largely wasted money. Everything else I know follows from that one idea.

This is also the ingredient people are most successfully sold nonsense about, so it is worth being clear about what the words on the label mean and which of them are doing any work.

The cooking oil

A decent, unremarkable extra virgin in a large tin. It is going into a hot pan where its subtleties will not survive, and paying a premium for delicate grassy notes you are about to destroy with a 200-degree pan is a donation, not a purchase.

Buy it in quantity, buy it in a tin rather than clear glass, and keep it away from the hob. Heat and light are what actually ruin oil — not time, within reason. The bottle sitting in the sun next to your cooker is degrading considerably faster than the identical bottle in the cupboard.

And yes, you can cook with extra virgin. The smoke point scare is overstated for anything short of deep frying; a reasonable extra virgin sits somewhere around 190 to 200 degrees, which is above almost all pan cooking. If you are genuinely deep frying, use something neutral, but that is a different decision.

The finishing oil

Small bottle, dark glass, harvest date on the label. This one goes on tomatoes, on beans, on soup at the table, over cheese, on bread, and never anywhere near heat. It is a seasoning, in the same category as flaky salt or good vinegar, and it should taste of something specific.

If there is no harvest date, put it back. This is the single most useful rule in the aisle. Best-before dates on olive oil are typically eighteen months to two years from bottling, and bottling can happen long after pressing — so a bottle can be well within date and two years old. A harvest date tells you when the fruit came off the tree, which is the only number that matters.

Buy the most recent harvest you can find and use it within a year of that date. Olive oil does not improve with age. It is fruit juice, and it behaves like fruit juice.

The peppery thing is the point

Peppery is not a flaw. That catch at the back of your throat is the polyphenols, and it fades within a year of pressing.

Fresh, well-made oil makes you cough slightly. That sting at the back of the throat comes from oleocanthal and the other polyphenols, which are the same compounds behind most of the health claims and the main thing protecting the oil from going rancid. Their presence is a sign of freshness and careful production.

They fade. An oil that was sharp and green in November will be noticeably rounder by the following summer and flat by the one after. So the bitterness you might read as harshness in a young oil is not a defect to be avoided — it is the thing you are paying for, and it is on a clock.

What the label actually means

Extra virgin means mechanically extracted, no heat, no solvents, and under a defined threshold of free acidity. It is a real standard, though enforcement varies enormously by country. Virgin is the same process with a looser threshold. Pure or light olive oil is refined — stripped and deodorised — and light refers to flavour, not calories.

Cold pressed is largely marketing at this point; almost all extra virgin is produced below the relevant temperature anyway. First press is entirely meaningless with modern centrifuges — there is only one press.

The more useful signals are a single country or estate of origin rather than a blend of several, a harvest date, dark glass or tin, and a variety named on the label. None of those guarantee a good oil, but together they suggest somebody who expects you to care.

Where I would spend the money

Roughly eighty per cent of my oil budget goes on the cooking tin, because that is where nearly all the volume is. The finishing bottle is small, expensive per litre, and lasts months because a meal uses a teaspoon of it.

If you only change one thing after reading this: get a second bottle, keep it away from the stove, and put it on things after they are cooked rather than before. It is the cheapest upgrade available to a home kitchen and it took me years to bother.