Tasting Olive Oils 101, Updated List & Cookbooks

More Italian food love... EVOO from Supermarket to Boutique

We are back in Italy for a bit 🇮🇹

The last Substack I gave some really simple but effective hacks for whipping up delicious pasta 🍝 at home in minutes.

Olive Oil is one of the tastiest and purely delicious ingredients you can have in your pantry. Health nuts also sing the praises of EVOO as it has many health benefits and is central to the Mediterranean diet.

In the last few years prices for olive oil have sky rocketed in large part due to droughts and heatwaves which have resulted in decreasing yields.

This makes choosing the best olive oils of the utmost importance.

I wrote about EVOO with some recommendations a while back so you can reference that as well. I now have some updated recommendations and also have some brief notes on the best way to taste olive oils and then some Italian Cookbooks that I love and wanted to pass on to you. 🙌

Tasting Extra Virgin Olive Oils

Most retail or tasting classes will have you taste olive oils by dipping pieces of bread into different olive oils.

This is not optimal at all.

Using this method, 75% of what you’re tasting is roasted flour, yeast or sourdough. Bread is not “neutral” in this case.

The best way to get the pure essence of the olive oil to take a spoonful and slurp it into your mouth (think of wine tasting). This will aerate all the volatile flavors and aromas and allow you to get an unfiltered experience of what the true flavors in the olive oil are.

Once you find an oil you love feel free to dip in some bread… then you’ll notice how that changes the flavor of the EVOO 🙌

Exploring Extra Virgin Olive Oils

Many people don’t even know where to start.

The fastest way to understand olive oil is to taste and research olive varietals. Just like with wine, this will give you good direction to seek out olives that resonate with your palate.

Example: One of of my favorite olives in Italy is Taggiasca.

Grown in Liguria, the capital of Genoa. Genoa is world famous for its’ pesto and while most people credit the basil in the local area, the olive oil is of equal importance: Taggiasca Olives.

When making basil, mortar and pestle is always best! I posted my favorite pesto recipe a while ago, use the search bar to bring it up.

Below are supermarket and also boutique olive oils I love and you should seek out