Joe Ray

Friday, March 23, 2007

Making Oil With The Brothers

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.