BWW Cooks: The Extra Virgin Olive Oil Question

Olive oil. We've been trained over the past few decades that we can't live without it. Especially extra-virgin olive oil, the foodie's fat of choice. Some home cooks have abandoned everything, except for deep frying, for olive oil. Especially extra-virgin olive oil.

Let's just say one thing: extra-virgin olive oil has gone past cult status into absurdity, to a place in which people who know little about food know that they're supposed to want to buy it. But do you want to buy it? It is not intended to be used for everything. Other forms of olive oil exist for good reason, and other oils and fats exist for good reason. Extra-virgin olive oil (please don't go around saying "EVOO," as that's merely a commitment to a particular cooking show host and not to the substance) is highly flavored and really intended for where that flavor is intended to shine: salads.

First-pressed, or indeed any press of, extra-virgin olive oil is a delight in salad dressings. So, however, are the more neutral grapeseed, the highly flavored walnut, the mild and delicious avocado, and a host of others. Walnut oil with flavored vinegars should be an oil of choice, in fact, if your salad contains nuts, as it will boost their flavor. Beet, goat cheese (or blue cheese) and nuts - a modern classic green salad? Raspberry-flavored wine vinegar, or a good red wine vinegar or dark balsamic, with walnut oil should be a go-to. Caesar dressing? Freshly made is the best, and olive is essential there.

Perhaps you're frying. An ordinary pure olive oil should be your choice for sautéing as the extra money spent on extra-virgin is wasted here. Extra-virgin oil holds up best and tasted best as a finishing oil, not a cooking oil. And if you're stir-frying, it simply won't do as it has a low smoking point. Stir-frying, Asian or otherwise, needs high smoke-point oils, especially soy or peanut, which are classic for Chinese cuisine. This writer was specifically trained on peanut oil for Asian cooking. The olive is also unknown in the Eastern cuisines, and the flavor of olive oil is, simply, wrong if your dish isn't East-West fusion.

The stronger the flavor of your olive oil, the better it is for handling hearty tasks, like dipping bread. Rather than spend a fortune on dipping oils, buy a robust or "robust" olive oil, which due to its nature will almost certainly be an extra virgin, and infuse it yourself with garlic, fresh rosemary, chilis, or your other flavors of choice - if lemon, remember to use lemon peel, not lemon juice. Peppercorns will also infuse, so choose an assortment of peppercorns for pepper-infused oils.

As it turns out, some people dislike the flavor of olive oil (this writer joins in that, she admits) for some things. Most producers now make extra-light or delicate-flavor olive oils, which are also considered suitable for baked goods. However, you still might want to confine these to breads and the like, as many of them are still not quite right for sweet items, and nothing will beat butter for Danish pastries and cookies, or butter or creamed shortening for pastry crust (and of those, old farm wives will still swear by lard for the finest pie crusts). I confess to a firm preference for butter in baking, especially the European cultured butters. If you want to experiment with olive oil, however, it's a legitimate effort.

One of the reasons not to go hog wild over extra-virgin olive oil in everything is its cost. A second is the issue of flavor - as with salads, are there better options for particular types, to give the best flavor? When this author bakes nut breads calling for oil, she likes to incorporate walnut oil to boost nut flavor in many circumstances. Even if olive oil is your favorite oil, trying the widest variety of other oils will expand your flavor profiles in many dishes. A third is that the price is due to the increasing olive oil shortage. As with the "chocolate shortage," it's not that olive oil is disappearing, it's simply that demand for extra virgin oil exceeds supply. Other monosaturated fat oils, aside from the other olive oils that aren't extra virgin, include canola and peanut oils, as well as avocado oil, whose profile is highly similar to olive oil. But a fourth, serious, consideration is oil adulteration.

Most ordinary olive oil is unaffected, but extra virgin olive oil is heavily "not as advertised" - up to 68 percent of what's sold as imported Italian extra virgin oil isn't. It's sometimes olive oil, but not extra virgin. It's sometimes olive oil, but imported from other countries into Italy. Sometimes it's been stored so carelessly that what's being sold, by the time it reaches US store shelves, is already degraded before the customer opens the bottle. And then there's the turning green of cheaper oil with chlorophyll, coloring and flavoring other oils to look and smell like extra virgin olive, and a plethora of other deliberate fraud issues. Even alleged "natural" and organic brands proved to be adulterated - sorry, Whole Foods.

Berio and Bartolli oil distributors have been subjects of lawsuits due to the claimed adulteration and due to poor post-shipping quality of oil sold in stores. Pompeian, a major player in the olive oil markets, is one of the first major oil importers to submit voluntarily to USDA inspection of its oils to insure purity, partly because they were previously announced to be one of the more highly adulterated extra virgin oils. Interestingly, during the various tests conducted on numerous commonly available oils, while the major importers and even Rachael Ray and her EVOO were embarrassed, two of the purest extra virgin oils turned out to come from WalMart and Costco. California olive oils are not similarly affected by the adulteration and degradation issues. (Regarding WalMart, when this author discussed the testing results with a professional chef, before she revealed the labels affected, he commented that he always used WalMart's oils at home because he preferred the value retailer's oil quality.)

It's worth becoming familiar with all of the available cooking oils and learning about them, rather than just relying on one or two, even if it's olive oil, as the one choice for your cooking. The different flavors and cooking uses will change your cooking in ways you wouldn't expect. You might find some new favorites among them. Tip: buy oils you don't know well in smaller bottles, so you don't have quantities of less favored discoveries losing quality and cluttering your shelves after they've been opened. No matter how great a sale you find on the big bottle, if you don't know that you'll like walnut or hazelnut oil, don't go for the bargain. Also, always buy the best quality oils you can find; lower quality oils aren't a good test of whether you really like the flavors. But be willing to experiment, especially with salad dressings. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the flavor alternatives available.

Photo credits: Freeimages.com

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