What is extra-virgin olive oil?
What is extra-virgin olive oil?
Extra-virgin olive oil is the precious unrefined first result of cold-pressing olives to make a fruity liquid that contains less than one percent acid.
Extra-virgin olive oil is the most expensive olive oil variety, and it is best appreciated in salads or as a garnish to give preparations a final flourish. If you are using olive oil to cook, it's fine to use regular olive oil.
Greece is the #1 consumer of olive oil in the world and also the leading producer of extra virgin olive oils, which account for 82 percent of their olive oil production. The U.S. is not a member of the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC), which regulates olive oil standards worldwide, and the IOOC does not recognize the U.S. standards for extra-virgin oil.
There is much controversy in the olive oil world, with accusations of corruption and adulteration smearing consumer confidence and shedding doubt on the purity of so-called virgin olive oil.
We like the full flavor and juiciness of olives that come with their pits still inside. If you're going to cook with olives, though, you'll need to remove the pits. Pitting olives adds a few minutes of prep time to a dish, but isn't hard to do.
You can buy tools made specifically to pit olives, but they often don't work for oddly sized olives and end up living permanently in the back of a kitchen drawer. Instead, we use a dough scraper or pastry cutter. You could use any tool that has a wide, flat surface (the flat side of a knife, a small skillet, etc.)
Just press straight down onto the olive with the flat surface until you feel the olive pop.
Continuing to press down gently, pull the tool back toward you. This will often make the seed pop right out.
If the seed hasn't popped out yet, just squeeze with your fingers to release it. Now you're free to keep the pitted olive whole to toss into a pasta or salad, chop it to stir into a sauce for grilled meat or fish, or toss it into the food processor to make tapenade.
Find more olive recipes on Cookthink.com.
A cutlet is a small, thin slice of meat or poultry taken from the leg or ribs. "Cutlet" derives from the French word côtelette. In French, côte means rib. (Some cutlets are "riblets" which are small cuts taken from the tip fo the ribs.)
Many classic recipes, like veal parmesan, call for cutlets, because they are particularly tender and easy to pound. Chicken tenders are sometimes labeled cutlets, as well. We like to use cutlets for impromptu stir-fries, as they're thin and easy to slice just before tossing into a hot pan.
Recipe: Seared Chicken Cutlets With Mushrooms
Recipe: Stir-Fried Chicken And Cabbage With Ginger
Recipe: Veal Cutlets Stuffed With Prosciutto And Sage
what you should know
Meaty, black and slightly sweet, the Kalamata is our favorite table olive.
Good flesh-to-pit ratio. Firm but slightly chewy. Strong and briny but without that mineral aftertaste left by so many olives. A perfect, plump nibble. Also great in tapenade.
Kalamata olives come from around Kalamata, Greece, a city at the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Kalamata is an earthquake-prone area that specializes in the production of olives, raisins and grandiose New Age music.
washed and soaked Almost all harvested Kalamata olives are kept whole for eating. (Only scarred and unshapely ones are used to make oil.) Kalamatas are washed, sometimes pitted, and then left in a red wine vinegar brine.
it's the pits We like to buy Kalamatas unpitted. The texture holds up better and is less prone to mushiness. Plus, pitting olives is good exercise.
what you need
In his Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit, Mort Rosenblum tracks the history and legend of the olive. This is one of the best culinary histories you'll read.
Though it's not really useful for anything else (except maybe displaying your collection of marbles), we're still suckers for this wooden olive canoe.
While OXO's cherry pitter can handle olives just as well, the easiest way to pit an olive is with your fist and a dough scraper.
what you do
In this simple dish of sliced mozzarella with green and black olive tapenade, the salty, umami olive spread plays off the clean, mild flavor of the mozzarella.
Speaking of tapenade, hogwash's pan-seared chicken with two-olive tapenade and sundried-tomato cream leaves you with enough left over for sandwiches.
For this simple spin-off of the classic baked Provençal tomatoes, we added Kalamatas, garlic and bread crumbs for extra flavor. (Cheese wouldn't hurt, either.)
A tuna, green bean and olive salad is not quite the classic Niçoise, but it's a solid jumping-off point for all kinds of variations.
This calamari, radicchio, white bean and Kalamata olive salad is a recreation of a salad Brys washed down with a cold beer on Naxos.
Featured recipe: This delicious flatbread El Greco comes from DC-area food blog Food Rockz and is the featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge.
