Use Extra Virgin Olive Oil for Healthy and Delicious Baking

The health ben­e­fits and unique fla­vors of extra vir­gin olive oil have made inroads in the bak­ing world in the last decades.

This is espe­cially true in Spain and Italy, where olive oil cul­ture has thrived for gen­er­a­tions.

Now, renowned pas­try chefs are using extra vir­gin olive oil in new and inno­v­a­tive ways, while researchers work to pro­duce solid olive oils that are capa­ble of offer­ing but­ter-like tex­tures and sta­bil­ity at room tem­per­a­ture.

“Using extra vir­gin olive oil for bak­ing cre­ates new kinds of solu­tions,” Alessio Busi, a food tech­nol­ogy con­sul­tant at Omar SNC, a food­ser­vice and tech­nol­ogy com­pany, told Olive Oil Times.

For Busi, olive oil’s dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tics, includ­ing its liq­uid form and strong fla­vors, sug­gest that it can­not be used as a direct replace­ment for but­ter.

“What pas­try chefs can do is use olive oil to explore and cre­ate new and dif­fer­ent prod­ucts,” he said.

An increas­ing num­ber of olive oil som­me­liers are ask­ing bak­ers to explore the oppor­tu­ni­ties that extra vir­gin olive oil brings to the bak­ing world.

They see EVOO as a viable plant-based alter­na­tive to ani­mal prod­ucts and a health­ier option to tra­di­tional pas­tries

How to choose the per­fect olive oil for bak­ing

“The first step is to choose the olive oil best suited for your bak­ing expe­ri­ence, a choice that will sig­nif­i­cantly impact on the final result,” Antonio Campeggio, a pio­neer in olive oil bak­ing and famous Italian pas­try chef from Puglia, told Olive Oil Times.

“Its acid­ity should be as low as can be with such fine prod­ucts, and if it is organic that is even bet­ter,” he added. ​“Its fla­vors should be round and soft, not intense because it is a raw mate­r­ial which has to amal­ga­mate with other raw mate­ri­als such as vanilla beans, whole­meal flour and so on.”

Located in Lecce, one of the largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing areas in Italy, Campeggio sees extra vir­gin olive oil as an obvi­ous ingre­di­ent for bak­ing. Still, per­ceiv­ing extra vir­gin olive oil’s pres­ence in short­crust pas­try, cup­cakes or choco­lates might sur­prise many cus­tomers.

“People’s palates are not always well edu­cated. All know but­ter, not all know olive oil in baked prod­ucts,” Campeggio said. ​“This means that we have to edu­cate them to rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate that unique fla­vor.”

“There is some work to do, but a high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil should be tasted,” he added.

How to bake with EVOO

While many pas­try chefs inno­vate with new bak­ing recipes that incor­po­rate EVOO, most home bak­ers and other chefs use olive oil as a healthy replace­ment for but­ter.

This hap­pens mostly in recipes that ask for the use of liq­uid but­ter, such as gra­nola, quick bread, brown­ies, muffins and some cakes. Many also use EVOO for short­crust pas­try too.

To obtain the best results, pas­try chefs replace but­ter with a smaller quan­tity of extra vir­gin olive oil and bake their goods using slightly dif­fer­ent tech­niques.

Butter recipes sub­sti­tuted with olive oil will need to be adjusted; 82 or 83 grams of extra vir­gin olive oil replace 100 grams of but­ter, with the rest of the vol­ume filled with water.

“There are a few things we need to be aware of when bak­ing with olive oil,” Campeggio said. ​“First of all, as it is a liq­uid fat, the result­ing prod­ucts, such as a typ­i­cal short­crust pas­try, tend to be more frag­ile, more del­i­cate.”

“In such cases, the knead­ing process will have to be slow and care­ful, and might be helped by leav­ing the dough in a fridge for a while,” he added.

Pastry chefs warn that cor­rect bak­ing tem­per­a­tures for EVOO-based cre­ations are even more impor­tant than they are for but­ter-based prod­ucts.

Most bak­ing is car­ried out with tem­per­a­tures vary­ing from 150 ºC to 250 ºC. When bak­ing EVOO-based prod­ucts, high tem­per­a­tures might end up fry­ing olive oil within the prod­ucts them­selves.

“Baking tem­per­a­tures should be mild,” Campeggio said. ​“For instance, when work­ing on a bis­cuit or a cookie we should not be more than 170 ºC or 180 °C, since fry­ing tem­per­a­tures are around 175 ºC or 176 °C.”

He added that this means prod­ucts will have a ​“straw yel­low bisque” tint instead of a cin­na­mon-like color.

While EVOO can­not replace but­ter in many recipes that ask for solid fat (which is sat­u­rated), it can still be used to enhance but­ter-based recipes.

“For instance, should we have a recipe ask­ing for 1,000 grams of but­ter, one could choose to replace 400 grams of that with extra vir­gin olive oil,” Campeggio said. ​“That would bring to a softer prod­uct, with EVOO used as an enhancer of the final struc­ture and tex­ture.”

EVOO as a solid fat for bak­ing

The next fron­tier for bak­ing with extra vir­gin olive oil is to have the unsat­u­rated fats of EVOO wholly replace the sat­u­rated fats of but­ter.

“That is the main hur­dle,” Busi said. ​“Whoever tries to bake a dough­nut using EVOO as the main fat will end up with a flabby prod­uct that is greasy and unbal­anced. Still, we can effi­ciently replace but­ter with olive oil in our recipes, but will need a workaround.”

A solu­tion some pas­try chefs are adopt­ing is to mix extra vir­gin olive oil with dif­fer­ently struc­tured veg­etable fats, such as coconut oil. This pro­duces a fat mix that does not include ani­mal prod­ucts and whose fla­vors may also offer hints of extra vir­gin olive oil.

“We call this vegan but­ter, which you can eas­ily obtain mix­ing cocoa but­ter with olive oil or fats from rice and peanuts,” Busi said. ​“That can there­fore be used to give value to local pro­duc­tions, for instance by choos­ing an extra vir­gin olive oil from a spe­cific region.”

In a not-so-dis­tant future, pas­try chefs and house­hold bak­ers alike could receive new inspi­ra­tion from sci­en­tific research.

Currently, sev­eral research teams are work­ing to find the per­fect solu­tion to cre­at­ing olive oil that is solid tex­ture at room tem­per­a­ture, which would offer new oppor­tu­ni­ties to the world of bak­ing.