Italian extra virgin olive oil

The Italian extra virgin olive oil is among the best ones in the world for its quality. I began to appreciate a good extra vigin olive oil through some friends inputs! A friend had a restaurant where we used to go sometimes on wekends to have dinner. I clearly remember he serving us artichokes with a special extra virgin olive oil. I began to notice that oils were not all the same.

Then we spent some days in Tuscany with another couple of friends and they introduced me to fruity extra virgin olive oil.

Who has already been in Tuscany knows that the olive trees are everywhere, contributing to its typical landscape.

What's the difference...

Well, olive oil is a generic word that means a generic oil. It means oil obtained from olives, but there are many types of olive oil.

The extra virgin olive oil is the best quality oil because it is obtained compressing the olives without warming them up nor using any chemicals. You will probably find many lables where it's written spremitura a freddo, that means cold squeezing.

The most generic olive oil can be produced partially using the scruff olives first used to produce the extra virgin type added with chemicals or heat to obtain more oil.

As I mentioned above, there's a kind of extra virgin olive oil called fruttato (fruity). It's my favourite one. It is done always using the cold method, but the olives instead of being harvested after falling down from the trees, are harvested while still on the olive tree.

It gives the oil a stronger taste and may cause you the typical throat scraple, that I assure you worths the try!

How to enjoy...

As I said somewhere else in this site, in Italian cuisine the quality of the ingredients is very important. So a good extra virgin olive oil will always improve your recipe, even if it's not the protagonist of it.

Another simple recipe that allows you to taste the oil is the famous Italian Caprese salad. Take a good quality Italian mozzarella (yes, I underlined Italian because other ones are often a cheese very different from Italian mozzarella), tomatoes, basil leaves, salt and...a good extra virgin olive oil.

Besides the good taste, this oil has a lot of healthy reasons that leads us to use it more often. It is a raw, non satured fat and used daily helps lowing cholesterol and avoid arteriosclerosis.

Italy's most known and huge production comes from Puglia region, but in smaller quantities it is also produced in many regions of Italy.