The Art of Producing High-Quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Understanding Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Producing good quality olive oil requires care and passion. Indeed, there are many easy and difficult ways to produce olive oil. However, our producers  consciously choose the one that is not easy and apply it correctly achieve success.

 Extra Virgin Olive Oil needs to be processed as following steps in order to keep olives in their most valuable form:

1 - Early Harvest / Ripe Harvest

Early harvesting is when olives are picked while they are still green or when they start to turn pink, when the weather starts to cool down in September-October in the Northern Hemisphere according to seasonal conditions. Early harvesting is of great importance in olive oil production. Because young olives contain high nutritional values and the amount of antioxidants called polyphenols is usually higher. The importance of cooler weather is that the current weather conditions for cold pressing should be at a maximum of 25-27 degrees Celsius.

Ripe harvest is the process of collecting pink and purple colored olives and producing olive oil. The taste is milder than early harvest. When picked and processed under the right conditions, the fruitiness will still be high, but the bitterness and burning will generally be lower than in early harvest. 

Extra virgin olive oil can be produced from both early and mature harvests.

2 - Hand Picking and Preservation

Perhaps the most laborious but most valuable stage in the production of quality olive oil is hand picking. Olives should be picked without contact with dust, soil, foreign matter and without being crushed. They should be collected in small and perforated baskets, not in sacks. This prevents the olives from crushing each other, heating up and fermenting. Crushed and spoiled olives should not be used in the production of special olive oil, and this is realized through the careful selection of meticulous eyes. Air circulation ensures that the olives retain their coldness. The olives must be taken to pressing quickly, without being kept under the sun or in a hot environment. The success of the logistics operation here is one of the key points for olive oil production. It should be pressed as fast as possible and kept in a cool and airy environment before pressing.

3 - Cold Pressing

With the developing technology, very efficient machines are used for olive oil production. It is important to produce olive oil using purely physical methods, that is, without increasing the heat during pressing and without using chemicals, in rough terms, by physically squeezing only the juice of the olives. Increasing the heat during pressing, prolonging the process and increasing contact with air negatively affect the nutritional values of olive oil. Contrary to popular belief, stone pressing is an outdated method. Although stone pressing was a method used to obtain olive oil before the industrial revolution, today's machines, where we get the maximum benefit from olives in the most natural way, allow us to produce more accurate and qualified olive oil. Machine pressing minimizes the oxidation and fermentation that can occur in stone pressing and the contact of olive oil with foreign substances. It ensures that the olives are only crushed in the malaxer itself and the oil is extracted quickly without raising the temperature.

4 - Filtration and Preservation

After olive oil production, the oil is preferably taken into chrome tanks. The impurities remaining in the olive oil are separated by methods such as paper filters or soil filters. Gases such as nitrogen or ozone are pumped into the tank to cut the contact of the oil with oxygen and prevent oxidation.

5 - Bottling

Again, with the help of machines, the olive oil is transferred from the tanks to the bottles with minimum contact with air and capped. This is the end of olive oil production. Glass bottles in small sizes (such as 250ML, 500ML, 1LT) are ideal packaging for olive oil. Large packages should be divided into small packages before use and stored without contact with air.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil is determined by sensory analysis as well as having a free fatty acid level below 0.8%. In other words, the oil must be perfect. For the production of quality olive oil, each item summarized above must be meticulously fulfilled. Otherwise, it is inevitable that defects such as browning, mold, oxidation and pulp may occur in olive oil.