The Flavors of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Extra vir­gin olive oil (EVOO) is much more than just the health­i­est edi­ble oil. It is also a vehi­cle to dis­cover thou­sands of dif­fer­ent fla­vors.

It is pro­duced in dozens of coun­tries at dif­fer­ent ele­va­tions and cli­mates from hun­dreds of olive vari­eties, each pro­vid­ing a spe­cific and unique fla­vor pro­file.

Along with geog­ra­phy, dozens of other vari­ables impact the fla­vor expres­sion of an extra vir­gin olive oil; cli­mate, prox­im­ity to other plants, farm­ing tech­niques, pro­cess­ing tech­nolo­gies and stor­age facil­i­ties all affect fla­vor.

Furthermore, pro­fes­sion­als can blend the oils of dif­fer­ent vari­eties, or cul­ti­vars, to cre­ate a poten­tially infi­nite num­ber of aro­mas and tastes.

Understanding EVOO fla­vors

While any­one can learn to taste and appre­ci­ate extra vir­gin olive oils and all the poten­tial fla­vors, they are also eval­u­ated by pro­fes­sional tasters, usu­ally orga­nized in pan­els.

Their work is tra­di­tion­ally coor­di­nated by a panel leader who sum­ma­rizes the results of the tast­ings and ulti­mately con­firms the cat­e­gory of the olive oil in ques­tion and whether or not it deserves to be called extra vir­gin.

Producers use pan­els to decide which mono­va­ri­etals (oils made from a sin­gle olive vari­ety) to com­bine into blends. Tasting pan­els are also formed to eval­u­ate the qual­ity of EVOOs sub­mit­ted for com­pe­ti­tions.

Two of the most rel­e­vant char­ac­ter­is­tics of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil are the pres­ence and inten­sity of bit­ter­ness and pun­gency, which indi­cate the pres­ence of phe­no­lic com­pounds.

“Our first mis­sion is to record the iden­tity card of the extra vir­gin olive oil, con­firm it is free of defects, eval­u­ate the pres­ence of fruity notes, which we can also describe as being green or ripe, or for their inten­sity, and eval­u­ate the pres­ence of bit­ter­ness and spici­ness,” Simona Cognoli, a pro­fes­sional olive oil taster and founder of Oleonauta, told Olive Oil Times.

“Tasting EVOO is at least as rel­e­vant than the phys­i­cal-chem­i­cal analy­sis of the prod­uct,” she added. ​“When I bring them to my courses, con­sumers start by tast­ing some bit­ter extra vir­gin olive oil, which most of them find unpleas­ant.”

“Then I bring them on a guided tour of dif­fer­ent extra vir­gin olive oil fla­vors,” Cognoli con­tin­ued. ​“As the last step, they go back to that bit­ter EVOO, which might be bit­ter indeed but is also well har­mo­nized with its spe­cific notes, and they do not even find it bit­ter any­more, as they have come to per­ceive the full range of its aroma and its taste.”

“That is how many of them dis­cover that bit­ter­ness is part of the EVOO char­ac­ter and end up lov­ing it,” Cognoli said.

Aroma and taste

All con­sumers can fol­low the steps of olive oil tasters and chefs to learn how to taste and com­pare extra vir­gin olive oils, dis­cover their scents and exper­i­ment with their use as a raw dress­ing or cook­ing ingre­di­ent.

“They do not only give value to a spe­cific recipe; the aroma and taste also deliver new emo­tions to a dish,” Cognoli said.

Depending on their char­ac­ter­is­tics, pro­fes­sional chefs and ama­teur cooks alike can add fla­vors to their dishes rang­ing from aro­matic herbs to trop­i­cal fruits and much more.

“There is an entire world of scents and tastes to explore,” Cognoli said.

These notes can con­tribute to fla­vor depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar EVOO and how it is included in the dish. In addi­tion, aro­mas will be affected by the tem­per­a­ture of the dish when the oil is employed.

Such a vari­ety of pos­si­ble out­comes means that chefs and ama­teurs should rely on more than one EVOO in the kitchen.

“If we con­sider extra vir­gin olive oil as a recipe ingre­di­ent, then we can­not use the same EVOO for all our dishes,” Cognoli said. ​“That is some­thing that not all chefs have explored yet, maybe because many have yet to dis­cover the out­stand­ing vari­ety of EVOOs we have at our dis­po­si­tion.”

There’s more to taste than fla­vor

Given the grow­ing bank of knowl­edge sur­round­ing the health ben­e­fits of polyphe­nols, many pro­duc­ers now focus on craft­ing EVOOs with the high­est pos­si­ble quan­tity of these organic com­pounds.

Still, those high lev­els do not nec­es­sar­ily trans­late into high-qual­ity prod­ucts.

“Many focus on the early har­vest to strengthen the pres­ence of polyphe­nols,” Cognoli said. ​“But pro­duc­ers have to be care­ful as the early olive is not only more dif­fi­cult to remove from the tree, it also can lead to an unbal­anced prod­uct.”

Some early har­vest EVOOs can lose their aro­mas more quickly, which are an essen­tial part of the plea­sure and the qual­ity of tast­ing, while EVOOs pro­duced with riper fruits will still main­tain an ade­quate vol­ume of polyphe­nols for some time.

“It is true that EVOO pro­vides rel­e­vant health ben­e­fits, but it is not a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, per se, which means that its healthy pro­file should accom­pany the plea­sure of con­sum­ing it,” Cognoli said. ​“It is not a food inte­gra­tor or a pill to con­sume daily.”

Still, high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion is under­go­ing major changes over time, as new tech­niques and pro­ce­dures are applied in the field and the fol­low­ing trans­for­ma­tion phase.

“Thanks to a grow­ing knowl­edge base and the devel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies, we are now more capa­ble of pro­duc­ing extra vir­gin olive oils which per­form from both a sen­so­r­ial and healthy point of view,” Cognoli said.

On top of that, many high-qual­ity EVOOs come from regions where cul­ture and his­tory are inte­gral to the prod­ucts.

“There is a whole world of scents and taste that can be explored, but there is also a world of beau­ti­ful sto­ries to know about pro­duc­ers and their lands,” Cognoli said.