Pressing olives

Getting some tips from the old fellow at the mill

Kiana had to fly home on Thursday, and I had to leave on Friday, so on Wednesday evening we took a trip to see the olive pressing plant.  We were a bit surprised because the place has been entirely renovated since the last time Christophe did the harvest in 2014.  Traditionally the harvested olives were washed and then ground up using a heavy millstone.  The resultant paste was spread onto filtration mats and then pressed for about a half an hour under heavy stone weights.  Here is a photograph of one such mill I found on Google images:

You can see the large round stones at the back of the room used to the olives; the circular mats that will hold the olive paste during the pressing are being stacked in the foreground prior to the placement of large weights on top of the mat/paste sandwich; the weights will compress the crushed olive paste, and extract the oil.

a continous process decanting machine

However romantic the idea of stone mills and traditional cold pressing, the reality is that this old method does not always produce the best quality oil.  Nearly every press in the area has transitioned to the continuous method, which produces a much more consistent high quality and longer-lasting olive oil than the old method.

Above you you can see Christophe discussing the olive paste with a technician.  The olives are brought into a pressurised cleaning machine, which passes the cleaned olives in one direction, and expels any stems, twigs, leaves, and dirt in the other.  Then the olive fruits are crushed and stirred in a large screw, kind of like one you would see on a meat grinder.

This paste then passes into a large decanter where it is centrifuged to extract the different oils from the water and the solids... at the end of this process, one can expect to get about 12-15 litres of oil for every 100 kg of olives.

sampling some of the press's own oil production

the finished product

I continued to pick all day on Thursday, and Christophe also did more picking after I left on Friday.  In the end we harvested around 450 kg of olives, and this produced about 56 litres of oil.

This past Monday, Christophe arrived back home with the precious cargo, and we all had a little taste of our oil.  It was delicious!

I was asked after publishing my last post why I went to Italy to pick olives.  For several reasons... the first reason is that I like food, and particularly like to see how it is grown and produced.  Olive trees are one of the earliest cultivated trees, and they've been grown for food for over 6,000 years.  So that connection with history and pre-history is always something that interests me.  I also wanted to have a nice quantity of oil for personal use: it's fun to use food on special occasions that you made yourself.  I like to grow garlic and basil and vegetables, and make bread quite often, Maggie likes to make jam, and so this is a similar thing.

Secondly, Christophe needed help to do the olive harvest, and as I had no singing contracts in early November after a fairly busy October, I saw no reason not to go.  The cost of the flights was very low, around 30-50 EUR each direction, and the food and drink cost was under 50 EUR per person for the week.  I wasn't sure if we would make any money from the sale of any surplus oil, but it would be an adventure at least, and one that would cover my costs.

Thirdly, the idea of a checking out a large house for a number of families to stay in in Tuscany was an intriguing one, and I was thinking of it kind of as a reconnaissance trip.  We haven't spent much time in Italy yet as a family, we are already musing about a working vacation there with more people, maybe during the Toussaint holiday next year.  If that works out, I would imagine that we would plan to do the harvest a little less intensively, so there would be more time to explore the area and enjoy the experience of living in Italy.  For one thing, the forests and hills around that part of Tuscany look like they'd be wonderful for trail running!