`An Olive Oil Tasting at Fairway Market - Olive Oil Times
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An Olive Oil Tasting at Fairway Market

By Lara Camozzo
Apr. 18, 2013 01:16 UTC

Steve Jenkins is known as a cheese­mon­ger, olive oil retailer, and the mas­ter mer­chant for Fairway Market since the early 1980s, but he refers to him­self as a ​“stu­dent of olive oil.” On Wednesday April 17th, a World Olive Oil Tour was held at the Broadway Fairway Market loca­tion, hosted by Jenkins who said, ​“I want you to learn some­thing every sin­gle time you come into one of my stores.” The tast­ing was part of the pro­gram for the first New York International Olive Oil Competition.

With over a dozen loca­tions to choose from, and an array of up to 40 extra vir­gin olive oils avail­able to taste every day, Jenkins has cre­ated an oppor­tu­nity for his cus­tomers to become stu­dents as well. His unfil­tered bar­rel oils have been labeled with regional and vari­etal infor­ma­tion by Jenkins him­self who said, ​“We want you to have all the infor­ma­tion you need, and on top of that taste the oils, so there’s no fool­ing around. Unless the con­sumer under­stands the geog­ra­phy, they’re not going to under­stand olive oil.”

Jenkins spe­cial­izes in French Provençal extra vir­gin olive oils, which were on dis­play at the tast­ing, along­side a vari­ety of other European oils. Beginning with a mild and smooth Arbequina from Spain, Jenkins insisted that the oils be tasted along with a plate of kumato toma­toes, arugula, a French goat cheese known as Boucheron, rare slices of steak, and acorn fed Hamon Iberico. Each table had a dish of sea salt.

“We’re try­ing to pay respect to things that hap­pened a long time ago,” said Jenkins, ​“and that’s the way we think about food and cook­ing. We like every­thing to be the old way at Fairway. We believe in tra­di­tion, in try­ing to pre­serve the ingre­di­ents that belong in our kitchens. We’re old timers. We know that olive oil hasn’t changed for cen­turies.”

Other extra vir­gin olive oils at the tast­ing included a pun­gent Provençal oil called Moulin des Penitents, fol­lowed by the Huile d’Olive de Nyons made from the nutty and creamy Tanche vari­etal, and another mildly pun­gent and but­tery Provençal oil called Moulin du Mas des Barres. The last two oils came from Fairway Market’s unfil­tered bar­rel oil selec­tion. The Gata-Hurdes from the north­ern-most sub-region of Extremadura has achieved a cult fol­low­ing with its unique and adap­tive olive vari­etal known as the Manzanilla Cacerena. The final oil, Cabeco das Nogueiras from Central Portugal, was a crowd pleaser.

Jenkins stressed, above all, that con­sumers need to know how to spend their dol­lars wisely on fresh, qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil. ​“You need to under­stand what sub­re­gion appeals to you, and after you get the geog­ra­phy down then you can begin to think about which vari­etals thrill you the most. You have to be able to get that infor­ma­tion before you can make those choices.”

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