I hope you enjoyed that video! Do you like olive oil? Did you know it was supposed to be spicy because it's apparently supposed to be spicy ??? If you want some behind the scenes from this video, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter: www.answerinprogress.com/newsletter
I'm from the region that produces most of the olive oil on Earth, Andalucia (Spain) and here, if it's not a bit "spicy" (if it is spicy, it stays on the tong) then it's not good olive oil (also, the deeper the green the better, I have pics of different types if you want to know)
So Sabrina..... Acidity - you did find out what that means in olive oil right???? It is the percentage of free oleic acid . So this oleic acid is the good of virgin olive oil. if you damage the olive, or press it with heat, then the oil is broken in three (I cannot find the source, but the olive oil molecule is a three part thingy) I can send you pictures from the live harvest of me and my parents. The cold press and green olives we picked has only a 10% olive oil per weight. We got 50 litres for 500 kilos of olives.
Yes, but I was fortunate enough that, buying olive oils in my job, I had the priviledge to visit small cooperative olive oil producers in Andalucia producing a real great extra virgin olive oil, though there's slight differences to the one you produced in the video - might have to do with the fresh olives going straight from the trees to the oil mill though. XD
Find out if they're likely to have diluted it with industrially processed oils such as soy, etc. Hopefully less likely in Morocco; but that certainly occurs in Italy.
Hahah you can actually see the difference between olive oil you get from a farm and the one in supermarkets btw how much does it cost in your area? Mine is around 47.5dhs/liter
that bdg reference was highly irrelevant and was for no more than a second but it was incredibly important to me, thank u sabrina, i feel so seen in this olive video,
@@omairtech6711 - I am not confident that the person on the phone knew what was being referred to with "fresh olives". Might have been thinking that they do have olives, and that they are indeed still fresh / perfectly in-date for consumption.
@@Siberius- I would even say, that fresh olives might not be sold at all. I mean, the reason for them being preserved in any given way might be that they could spoil very quick. Also, different than for example blueberries, there is not a big market of people who want to buy the product on a daily basis. While blueberries are available in the shop here in Europe all year through, they are a seasonal product and have to be imported during the winter from somewhere else. Same would be true for olives and as I just said, there are not that much people baking olive muffins.
Hearing Melissa say she never actually saw fresh olives in her life got me so confused as a Spainard. I was like "girl? there are shops dedicated just to sell different types of olives and somehow you can find chips in there too?" Such a cultural shock
The lower quality "Pomace Oil" is used in a lot of bottled salad dressings, its used in breads, and is the primary sauté oil at a lot of restaurants. You HAVE seen and tasted it, you just didn't realize it.
Olive oil is very important in the Jewish holiday of Chanukah so my primary school did a yearly presentation where an oil maker would put a bunch of olives in this weird bucket, add wooden blocks on top and sort of clamp down on the olives to extract oil. Just felt relevant to mention
Best Olive Oil I ever tasted was a bottle I bought on a market in Israel. It was a real "oh wait, that's what it is supposed to taste like?"-moment and that actually helped me distinguish the genuine stuff from the fake ones in supermarkets just by taste.
The weirdest thing about not having a sense of smell is when someone says something has a smell when you didn't expect it to. Like olive oil and olives having different smells.
You only find that where it is made. My mother in law takes home a lot of bottles of olive oil each year. Like they always brought a suitcase full of food back home. The difference is that most people haven't actually tasted good olive oil. Like in the netherlands it isn't typical to just dip bread in good olive oil, because it isn't that good with the olive oil you buy here unless it is super expensive. Which most don't buy
That extra virgin olive oil is like 5€ per liter here in Spain, they really scam you when importing it with that price gauge. Also, many of us don't use it to cook, we use it for dressing salads and food that don't get hot, we use more normal olive oil to cook
I know people who use extra virgin oil both for everything, and only for dressing. The difference I noticed is that people who use it only for dressing tend to do so because they think it's very expensive and they don't want to "waste money". It may be not as expensive as in the US, but expending €5/$6 on a bottle every two weeks is kind of a lot for a lot of people, specially when you compare it to other cheaper oils. Even among those who use it for everything think it's expensive, but they think the "sacrifice" is worth it.
I really like the collabs you do with your friends, its such a lighthearted funny part of the video, I love it. You keep knocking it out of the park with videos like this
Spaniards hate when spanish olive oil its sold as italian because its one of the best things of spanish food (witch I have to say, it's highly underrated )
@@daklhs6460 yeah, he posted his last video with them a couple months ago. He’s doing some great videos in his personal channel as well as some freelance stuff.
I went to a uni that was based as an agricultural school, we had olive trees all over campus and even though they looked like decoration, they weren't, they were harvested every year and different products were made from them, including evoo (which could be bought in the campus bookstore lol). The uni has a LOT of different studies/faculties going on there, but no matter what your major was, a student almost always came out of that school knowing some things about agriculture (it's one of the first unis in the States to have a viticulture and brewing school where you could even get a master's in those subjects). As for olive oil, one thing we all learned was if you lived in a region of the world that produced its own olive oil, 9 times out of ten you should buy olive oil from that region, less time in shipping and sitting on the shelf means better quality, and with oils that can go rancid, this is a big factor.
I'm from Spain and we have different types of olive oil widely available here, in any supermarket you'll find at least an extra virgin and a refined one. There's usually variety within those as well though, depending on the type of olive used or how strong the taste is. I thought this was normal until I went to live in the US for a year and there I only saw the extra virgin kind. I have to say I'm not surprised it may be fake oil because fairly often the taste was pretty different from the one here. It definitely was much milder and reminded me more of the refined oil than the extra virgin one.
Tbh that explains more my frustration while watching the video. I didn't understand how they weren't familiar with the different types(just the types, not production etc) of olive oil and how they couldn't taste the difference? I mean, they apparently have tasted olive oil and felt kinda familiar with the concept, so I couldn't figure out how confusing this could be. At the end of the video starting realising that they probably have only one type and probably from a not-actually-olive-oil kinda brand.
I'm so glad that you talked about this! It's actually a HUGE problem because a lot of people have dietary restrictions that make them sicker when they consume canola/vegetable oil. For those people their options are typically avocado and olive oil, and most prefer olive. They often don't even know that they continue to have symptoms because of the fraudulent oil, which causes them to further restrict their diet looking for a solution, or even giving up. It's horrible, these companies profit off of worsening peoples' sicknesses. As a tip, actual olive oil MUST be stored in dark containers, so while dark container =/= real, clear container = real. Cooking with lard is a great option (easy to make it yourself so you can be sure it's real), but the flavor makes it incompatible with a lot of dishes.
I'm from Morocco but grew up in the Netherlands. In Morocco we L O V E olive oil, and my immigrant mom literally has a family member make the olive oil for her (yes, in a farm), then ship it to us in gallons. Just wanted to share this funny cultural thing lol.
You have the perfect balance of an interesting topic, transitions to keep my easily distracted mind entertained, and well-delivered jokes. And you’re POC!! Idk makes u relatable
Thanks for your video. When I learned that there was a lot of fake olive oil in the world, I decided not to ever buy imported ever again. I'm in the USA and I decided to only buy olive oil grown in California. I figure that anyone claiming their EVOO is grown in California would face great scrutiny in that state, and likely be called out for any discrepancy. So there is a brand called California Olive Oil, and they do have their own farm groves and they harvest, press and bottle it. They sell both 100% California grown (more expensive), and blends of imported EVOO, from companies they trust. I don't know if I should trust them, but since it appears likely that I can, that is what I've used for several years.
I worked for a store specializing in olive oil for 4.5 years so basically I got an unofficial BSc in olive oil. Basically nothing you're buying in a grocery store is actually extra virgin olive oil because it is most definitely not free of sensory defects, and chances are most of the 'Italian' olive oil is made with olives from elsewhere like Tunisia and packaged in Italy, if it's even 100% olive oil, which it might not be because mixing with soy/hazelnut/whatever oil is pretty common. If you're lucky enough to have a tasting bar-style place near you, it's definitely worth it to pop in and try some real, fresh olive oil. Fun facts: olive oil is more profitable for the Italian mafia than drugs, and the CEO of Colavita did jail time for food fraud involving adulterated olive oil.
A few years ago, my dad got a tiny bottle of high quality olive as a participation prize for running a half marathon. I had some on a bit of bread and instantly realized that all the olive oil I'd had before that was either old or cut with something else - this was just So Olive-y.
It's unfortunately really common that most grocery store olive oils are either really rancid, heavily refined, or cut with something cheaper like soybean oil - especially anything labelled 'light'. Olive oil should taste and smell like olives with a peppery finish to it.
Living in California, I know we grow a lot of olives in this state and I’m just like hey, why do we need Italian olive oil? We could be making olive oil on par with the greats but we keep the price and quality low instead!
I can't get over how amazing your videos are from a production standpoint. Everything from the camera quality/angles to the audio to the motion graphics to tracking and masking that "no free promo" bubble has me floored. Keep up the amazing work!
In Britain, Italian cuisine is much more prevalent than other olive oil-producing countries, so Italian oil gets the most exposure. If the shop has a range of olive oils, there might be some other origins, I've seen Greek and Spanish before. The distinction is more about Italian vs. unknown origin, rather than rating the countries against each other.
I had good oil from greece, spain and italy, in the end the climate is similar and the conditions comparable. Of course there will be differences, but that's also true from region to region like in wine.
The best olive oil is Italian; however, if you don't live in Italy, more likely than not you are better off NOT buying oil sold as "Italian" (except maybe from Eataly, but they will rip off you an arm and a leg). If you consider that Italy consume twice as much olive oil than they produce, you can form a rough estimate of your chances of buying genuine Italian olive oil. Also, if you are not buying the super extra fancy stuff, Spanish and Greek oils are as good as the Italian ones, with less chances of adulteration.
The video was great, very interesting and well made, but I'm amazed at how you managed to make a video about olive oil and not mention Spain a single time. Spain literally produces TEN times the olive oil Italy does., and just as good of course.
There once was a man who was allergic to olives. After realizing he accidentally ate a pizza that had them he calmly paused his chewing and said, “S’all good I’ll live”😉
I worked a bit in organic olive oil factory in Andalusia. This was organic farmers co-op that specialized in high quality oils. On the contrary for belief most of the oil is in the stone (some cheap farmers poison the land under the tree that nothing grows and then just pick up fallen dried stones from the ground) For oil making there are 3 steps: 1) washing 2) crushing 3) centrifuge Centrifuge is used to separate all the pulp and water from the oil very fast. So basically there is tap in the right place and oil comes out of that. For highest quality oils centrifuge is not a good solution because it gets oil too hot. And olive oil's characteristics diminish with temperature. So centrifuge is replaced with big vertical tank and all this mix will separate over time (that's weeks around 20 degrees celsius). Olives get ready in the winter and these rooms need to be heated. When it is too cold oil will not separate as fast. Then again you can adjust tap to right place and you can get oil. I the old times olives were crushed with standard millstones and oil was separated with similar method I wrote. But I agree the oil we find in the supermarket does not qualify for quality :D Having had amazing oil, I can say there is a difference.
I discovered this channel yesterday from a video featuring Tom Scott. I watched most of the videos now. I never laughed as much before on a video. You have a new fan! It is even better that you are also from Canada!
Italian here, there is definetly foreign stuff selling as Italian extra virgin oil even in our own market, i suppose exports are much more subject to that. The thing is, you don't need high-tier oil for everyday cooking. It's better to buy cheaper stuff and don't get ripped off, maybe keeping a bottle of really good quality oil for particular preparations (like wine basically). Sadly I can't give you any online source because it all depends on your country importer. But there are a lot of companies, even pretty small, that do a really great job!
Buy Spanish Olive oil, Spain produces most of "Italian" oil anyway and it's better as the industry behind oil is extremely protected and developed. Italians are good at branding, spaniards are good at making the actual thing, if you buy Italian you're probably getting more expensive less quality Spanish stuff anyway...
I was in Israel and was at a place where they made olive oil, and they had an old millstone or grindstone setup used back in ancient times. It basically is this big donut shaped rock with a hole in the center and then there's a smaller donut shaped grindstone on top, and there'd be a beam inserted through the grindstone that a donkey would be strapped up too and would walk around in circles rolling the grindstone around the base. They'd lay out the olives around the rim of the base stone and then grind them down. Before the whole grindstone method, olive oil was gotten by using a similar setup except people would just walk circles around barefoot on a layer of olives, the oil draining into the center. Burger King foot lettuce has nothing on barefoot olive oil. Anyway, I asked them about virgin olive oil, and their reply was that there was no such thing as extra virgin olive oil from the pressing standpoint. It's a modern classification, but in their opinion wasn't real. Historically, virgin olive oil was what came from the first pressing of the olives, and was the best stuff. They would re-press the olives multiple times, each time bringing less quality olive oil, which that had hebrew names for I don't remember and couldn't pronounce anyways. Virgin was the main one used for human consumption still, with the lower qualities being used for different functions. But saying "extra virgin" to them was like saying an apple was "extra hand-picked". It just doesn't make any sense.
This was actually pretty interesting, I don’t know why but I am somewhat interested in that olive oil book especially the chemistry and understanding more of the fraud behind the industry. Plus I actually feel bad for Melissa that she had to drink that lol
I have limited experience with this topic, so I wanted to share before I forgot it. Hopefully I'm not hijacking too much. I worked as a (junior) chemist at a company which developed oils products from many natural sources. We had this hydraulic apparatus about the size and form factor of a by-hand meat grinder on the benchtop of our lab which we would load up with things such as perhaps olives and turn on. It would squeeze them pretty hard, like a car driving over a narrow pillar of metal. We would also wrap it in electric heating tape sometimes, as the increased temperature helped the oils separate out more. This was always my mental image of how virgin olive oil was made (except obv larger presses). Using force alone, only a certain amount of oils could be extracted though, the rest requiring chemical methods. We would then take what was called the Press Cake, and things would get pretty unnatural. We would dump a bunch of hexane(s) onto it quite often, which is a petroleum product not far off from lighter fluid or gasoline, except much more pure. This would dissolve everything. We could then do various more technical transformations or purifications on this solution such as centrifugation (like a washing machine but with little swinging buckets and perfectly balanced by the operator, spinning at jet engine speeds), or various forms of distillation, or bleaching (no bleach involved, actually involves filtering the oil through special clays), something called winterization which is a controlled freeze-thaw cycle. We could also do things under pressure like superheating it in a big 100L reactor and injecting tiny amounts of water into the oil: causes flash boiling inside this vessel, forcing out various natural volatile components (process is known as sparging), or if we wanted to create a solid product, natural oils could be hydrogenated (which is how for instance margarine is made). Basically injecting very high pressure hydrogen gas into the oil in a closed chamber at very high pressure. We operated at the 1 to 10 kilogram range in the lab, but developed processes that would be performed at the 1000kg level in the plant next door if our clients thought them fruitful. Oh yeah, and the hexanes? At some point, they get boiled off completely, leaving a food grade product once again. Basic store bought canola oil goes through most if not all of the processes above. It wasn't the most happy workplace, especially because it was pretty dangerous, and I was glad to escape it ultimately. It was still pretty memorable though. Anyone who is still reading this, thanx. Also to Answer in Progress - ur vids are so good. Double thanx.
I'm from Málaga, Spain and hearing all the ppl that don't live here talking about the olive oil like is something strange or idk XDD It's very weird, cuz here is almost impossible not to find extra virgin olive oil in any supermarket and it is at a very cheap price, like 1€ or less. Btw, I found ur channel this day and I love it. It's so interesting to see all the things u do like learning how to solve a rubik's cube and so. Hope u get far
I thought I was allergic to olive oil for a good few years, until I found out I’m actually allergic to a different oil that is used as filler in olive oil. It’s a slippery slope, quite literally
11:36 Might be wrong but looks like a water-oil emulsion. That is what happened in some of my early attempts at making walnut oil using water. I'd grind the walnuts till they start secreting oil and then to that walnut-buttery goop I'd add water and mix thoroughly. My reasoning behind it was that when sufficiently diluted, the mixture would separate: the solid particles falling to the bottom, the oil floating to the top - separated by water. Not what happened. Instead, water molecules binded with oil molecules, forming an emulsion - permanently. I put the thing away for a week and there was no sign of water and oil separating. So yeah, since then I keep water out of my crazy oil-pressing experiments (walnuts, hazelnuts, avocado, etc; olive oil I've not attempted)
This video yeeted me to 2015 when I visited Israel for 6 weeks on a trip with a group and at one point we went to a random place that used to be an ancient olive oil refinery, and we got to use a model but functional ancient olive press to make olive oil 😂😂😂 such a specific memory that I thought I would never be relevant ever again
I doubt someone may read my comment or even they will allow it to stay. I've been collecting olives and producing olive oil from our land in Jordan since I was 5, nothing in this video is similar to how actually olive oil is produced. Although thumbs up on the great effects.
Funny story. I lived with my grandmother who managed a fast food franchise. I asked if she would get me a small bottle of EV olive oil because I was interested in cooking and had never used any, only tasted it at Olive Garden. This is something that costs about $3-4 at Wal-Mart. Instead, she personally ordered and paid for an extra gallon bottle of oil from work. It was a gallon of 10% olive oil, 90% vegetable oil, which honestly tasted bad. Long story short, it was years before I was able to buy my own, normal olive oil. The whole thing makes no sense to me, as the gallon was more expensive than what I wanted, but in her mind there was no cheap olive oil, and she refused to buy a cheaper, smaller bottle of unadulterated olive oil.
This was a lot more informative than I originally thought it would be! - Living in New England, I do not have access to locally sourced olives. Also not locally produced avocados, but since I hate avocado, it's not a loss for me. Goat cheese, buffalo meat, llama and alpaca wool yes. Also a lot of local honey producers, REAL maple syrup, ciders (hard and not), and a number of microbreweries and mead makers. Lots of smaller farms and co-ops producing vegetables, fruit, dairy and meats.
Did you know that there is also Saffron fraud and shady tactics as well? By the way super good video people i know never pay attention to the type of oil they buy. There is also the fact that oils like grapeseed and others that don't have a naturally oily base, have higher heat tolerances due to the exaction methods. Keep up the good work you two
