How Olive Oil Is Made

for the health-conscious gourmet there's one ingredient that sure to set the tastebuds sizzling from frying to salad dressing olive oil is an essential in any modern kitchen a wide variety of grades and flavors are available but they all have one thing in common no it's not the green bottle it often comes in but the olives themselves each type of olive has a unique taste by combining different types that producer can create an oil with an individual flavor the process begins at harvest the traditional method involves connecting olives using tiny rakes but it's not very efficient for a big cut like the one on this farm an automated harvester is used instead the machine surrounds each tree and literally shakes the olives off the branches the fresh fruit is collected into a waiting hopper along with some leaves and twigs but these can easily be removed later a machine like this can collect as many olives in an hour as it would take the traditional farmer to collect in an entire day when the harvest reaches the production plant that fruit has washed to remove any dirt leaves or twigs that were caught up in the collection process the more stubborn twigs and branches that remain are filtered out using a grill which only allows the fruit to pass through to get the best quality oil the fruit should be pressed as soon as possible traditional methods mean there's a delay between harvesting and the grinding process the original method also uses big mill stones like these granite wheels to grind both fruit and the stones into a thick pulp but modern production carefully controls two vital factors first the fruit is sent directly from the harvester to the grinders where this little delay as possible and second the fruit is ground more gently olives can lose flavor if the fruit is heated by the friction of grinding the most sought-after olive oil is called cold-pressed if the fruit pulp goes over 27 degrees it can no longer be called this and loses value it's time to extract the oil in the traditional system the pulp is layered between hemp maps each quantity of pulp is followed by another mass and so on until the alternate layers look like a stack of giant pancakes the stack is placed in a hydraulic press which literally squeezes the oils from the pulp its collected below and has the traditional cloudy golden color associated with good quality olive oil the modern method is far less aggressive but just as effective instead of crushing the pulp it's spun in a centrifuge like this one as its spun around the oil passes out through a fine mesh leaving the pulp behind the oil can then be siphoned off and stored while the remaining pulp is collected elsewhere it's not wasted though it's recycled and can be used as fertilizer or animal feed it may surprise you to know that once it's been pressed olive oil can be tasted like wine the experience is obviously very different but this is one way the experts can assess the purity and flavor of their product pure unfiltered oil is considered the month valuable if the residues are filtered out in a centrifuge like this one what emerges is considered a slightly inferior grade of oil the standard grade that you would find on a supermarket shelf it's stored in steel tanks like these here the final residue sinks at the bottom and what's pumped out at the end is a clear olive oil for the mass-market olive oil is usually bottled in green glass and is a good reason for this it helps filter out harmful UV light that can cause to deteriorate finally the bottles are sealed and labeled up ready to be shipped out to homes of restaurants all over the world so whether it's cold-pressed extra virgin for dressing or standard great for frying olive oil continues to be cooked up in kitchens everywhere

Channel: Triwood1973

Views: 5,383,006

Rating: 4.7782941 out of 5

Keywords: How, it's, made, olive, oil, for, cooking, food, manufacturing, process, healthy, eating

Id: aieNV3V4b_s

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/TSnoman]

This guy's voice sounds just like Kurzgesagt.

[u/Spirit_Theory]

They all have one thing in common. No, it's not the green bottle it comes in.

Who said bottle? Nobody. Nobody would say bottle.

[u/powerpointmonkey]

A good friend of mine is Italian and he gave me on of those homemade olive oil with a tag on the bottle "Marni Casa". It was made in his family's garden back home in Perugia, Italy.

It was hands down the best olive oil I ever had and it tasted like I had sprinkled it with some holy pepper. The texture was unbelievably thick and cloudy, none of that filtered and processed one that you find in WholeFoods. I would just whip out the oil on the plate with balsamic vinegar, and would spend hours dipping it with the bread.

Apparently, they have more 1k+ variations of olive oil in Italy alone and the volcanic soil enhances the taste!

[u/mcjredd12]

What about baby oil? 😄

[u/scumah]

My girlfriend works auditing this oil factories (called almazaras here in Spain), and just told me the video is very outdated. Harvesting is never done with rakes but with those or similar machines, called "umbrellas". Getting the olives from the ground to those mills with a shovel is also something that disappeared long ago. Also, extracting the oil is never done with that press anymore, and every almazara uses the "modern method" said in the video.

[u/rondeline]

There are some odd counter intuitive aspects in this video.

Like why would you process it further to get a "lower quality" product? Why does centerfugaling (sp?) Be better than crushing the fruit in a hydraulic press?

Stuff like that.

[u/KeingfBernd]

hahaah ok. Olive oil is one of the biggest scams ever. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the-olive-oil-scam-if-80-is-fake-why-do-you-keep-buying-it/#78cd43639d76

German cconsumer protection institutions like "Stiftung Warentest" back that up. They check olive oils quite often and most of them are trash.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/stiftung-warentest-kein-olivenoel-schneidet-gut-ab/19304372.html

headline is "no olive oil peforms well"

[u/samsc2]

I love how he starts talking about how the olive oils come in all different grades and flavors by using specific combinations of olives.... Mostly because pretty much all olive oil is a big ole scam. Doesn't matter what grade or type you buy it's pretty much the same exact stuff. The labels don't mean anything at all and it's such a sketchy market controlled by some even sketchier groups.

[u/MultiPlexityXBL]

shoot . . I just went down the "How its made" youtube rabbit hole. . . send help!