Olive oil: Golden liquid of Campania

Doesn’t matter what if we bake something or just cut the vegetables for salads, we hardly can cook it without oil. According to statistics, every year more and more families start to use olive oil in cooking process as the healthiest, tastiest and of the highest quality. In Italy most of the people don’t know that other types of oil could exist!
Everyone has a small green bottle of oil in the kitchen, but nobody muses on how long and laborious is its preparation. The process starts from the olive harvesting and takes a lot of time. I visited one fabric in Amalfi region and found out the main harvest secret from Neapolitan experts:

Olive trees “beating” – just take the stick…and beat the tree branches! Obviously, this ancient Spartan method has a high risk to damage olives, that’s why nowadays it is not used anymore.

“Do it manually” method – taking olives one after one by hand. Too long too boring, but 100% quality.

“Brushing” – it’s incredible, but even the trees have special brushes, which help to divide olives from the branches. Unfortunately, with such method it’s also easy to damage the fruits, so the second selection round should take place.

Harvest from the ground. Just read and forget it, premium oil cannot be prepared with such technology. Usually only the overmatured olives fall down, moreover downfallen fruits could spread a decay among neighbor olives!

Mechanic methods.In XXI century manufacturers have reduced hand-made processing of the trees and use technology which lets to shorten the time expenditures while saving the quality and structure of olives. Methods vary from comb-robots to mechanic overarm which clasps and shakes the tree. In other words, technological process changes the world!

I wish everyone a pleasant week!

Photo gallery