Italian extra virgin olive oil
Italian extra virgin olive oil, how olive oil is made, olive oil dip recipes among others. This valuable product has so many benefits that go from excellent taste in food to skincare benefits.
I began to appreciate a good extra virgin olive oil through some friends inputs!
A friend had a restaurant where we used to go sometimes on weekends 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 the fruity kind.
Who has already been in Tuscany knows that the olive trees are everywhere, contributing to its typical landscape.
What's the difference...
Some of you may not have confidence with olive oil and may be curious why I underline the long sentence extra virgin olive oil, and not just olive oil. It depends on how olive oil is made.
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 one 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, the fruttato (fruity) is 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 extra virgin olive oil a stronger taste and may cause you the typical throat scraple, that I assure you worths the try!
How to enjoy...
The best way to enjoy (and evaluate) a good extra virgin olive oil, in my opinion, is with olive oil dip recipes. Put it into a small bowl, add a basket of fresh and good bread aside and dip small pieces of bread into the oil and eat it as it is. As said before, 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 thread of 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.
Deep frying with olive oil is much better than using other kinds of oil, as it doesn't change its chimical structure during heating, with no consequences for our digestion.
Olive oil as moisturizer is an ancient secret of Italian women. Well, I used it and had no ladders during my pregnancies.
Italy's most known and huge production comes from Puglia region, but in smaller quantities it is also produced in many regions of Italy.
