Food & Travel / Words & Photos
The day before I left southern Sicily, Francesco and his brother Sal took me to the mill where they turn olives into oil - the perfect going away present for a food geek like me.
Something of an industrialist’s dream and photographer’s nightmare, the huge space is seemingly filled with nothing but stainless steel machines and white tile.
After Sal’s comprehensive tour, I can now say that I have seen the future, and though it’s not as sexy looking as the past, it tastes better.
“The old way of doing it is much more romantic, but the quality sucks,” said Francesco in his characteristic deadpan.
Two keys to the tourist-worthy ‘old way’ meant crushing the olives in an enormous granite-wheeled mill, then spreading the paste between circular woven mats called fiscola and crushing them in a press to yield the unrefined oil.
Compared with the ‘new way’, the granite mill now seems like a big vat to sneeze into while the olives oxidize and the mats look impossible to clean.
“Now, we can clean the whole system with water pressure,” said Francesco, who demonstrated by pretending to shoot a pair of machine guns from the hip.
The ‘new way,’ which producers were reluctantly getting used to when I was researching an olive oil story in 2002, is much different. Once the olives come into the mill, they are cleaned and de-stemmed and pulverized in two ways in a hammering machine called a frangitore a martelli, before being kneaded into a fine paste in stainless steel vats and passed through a pair of centrifuges.
The system is now a closed and temperature-controlled one where nitrogen is used to prevent oxidation. At the mill, they can even process different oils from different producers at the same time and the whole system is run by a computer.
“I can regulate the whole thing from Rome with my Palm Pilot,” said Sal, though I saved asking why for another day.
“The technology is so advanced here,” he said, gesturing toward the centrifuges, “that most experimentation and research concentrates on the hammers and the kneading.”
The goal of both of these processes is to keep the temperature low. Once the temperature goes up, the flavor leeches out.
The frangitore, for example, now crushes the olives two different ways (instead of one), which saves a couple of degrees. The paste is then pumped into the kneading vats which are held between 78.8 and 80.6 degrees. They’ll mix for no more than 30 minutes, as more than that makes the temperature rise.
The vats are also the first stage where nitrogen comes into play, replacing the air above the vats, in an effort not unlike pouring lemon juice over guacamole or a fresh-cut artichoke.
It seems like a lot of fuss, but as they explain it, modifying the system is the only way to increase quality.
We finish up the tour nibbling their almonds and drinking wine, poured from a giant stainless steel vat.
“Olive oil is not a product that can be modified,” said Sal who goes on to explain that you can mess it up, but you can’t really make it better.
“The difference between wine and olive oil is that you can work on wine in the winery. Olive oil is as it is. You just have to be good in the plant when you transform it.”
This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.
I was at the farm the other day with Francesco and his brother Salvatore. They were excited about the work two other brothers were doing, grafting olive trees. The goal of the grafting was to turn their carolea olive plants back to Sicily’s native verdese variety, by means of what looks like a brutal process, if you’re a tree.
To my very untrained eye, a tree graft looks like the equivalent of getting your legs chopped off above the knee, then having appendages the size of Barbie doll legs stuck in the stumps and being bandaged up by a grinning doctor who walks away five minutes later, saying you’ll be fine.
In this case, the grafters arrived with a picnic basket worth of olive tree branches, some seriously sharp knives called innestos, a chain saw, a roll of tape and a pack of paper and plastic bags Francesco got from the local baker, and worked their way across the grove, grafting as they went.
Most trees in the grove are a good 12 feet tall with big, beautiful, leaf-covered branches; I’ve taken to using one of them on the top of my hill as an office. The Brothers Graft clearly didn’t share my sentimental attachment to the trees. With two quick cuts of the chainsaw, one of them reduced a tree to a waist-height Y-shaped stump.
A bit shocked and amazed that the leafless, branchless stump could go on living, I asked Francesco how they survive.
“I’d survive,” he deadpanned.
“You’re a tough cookie, my friend,” I replied.
“We’re changing them from carolea plants by grafting verdese shoots,” he continued, not missing a beat.
I ask why they don’t just remove the old trees and plant new verdese plants.
“Buying a verdese plant is outrageously expensive,” he said. “Plus, the (existing) plant is already comfortable with the weather, the soil and all of the microclimatic conditions.”
“So what grows will be 100 percent verdese?”
“Yeah. It’s not a hybrid; it changes the whole identity of the tree.”
If all goes well, three years from now, verdese olives will be growing from these trees.
We walk over and take a closer look. After the limbs are felled, each brother takes a branch above the Y, and using the innestos, they quickly create slots (about two or three per branch of the Y) that they tap the new verdese shoots into. They tightly wrap the top of the stump with packing tape, coat the top with some plastic-y tree protector, cover with a plastic bag to create a greenhouse effect, then the bakery’s paper bags to keep the sun from damaging the tender shoots and move to the next tree.
Somehow, this reminds me of an instant sex change without the estrogen tablets.
“Ah,” said Francesco’s brother Sal, “but these babies will be prettier.”
This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland - with special thanks to Francesco for the photos.