An encyclopedia, true stories the sellers won’t tell you, and notes in two languages. From someone who spent twenty years in the trade and has nothing left to sell.
Extra virgin and virgin olive oil are both pressed the same way, from the same fruit, with no heat and no solvent, and the only things…
A true Kalamata is a specific Greek cultivar, almond-shaped, deep purple-black, split by hand or knife and cured in brine, often finished with red wine vinegar.…
Most people who say they are allergic to olives are reacting to olive pollen, not to the fruit or the oil, and the three are genuinely…
The black olive slice on a frozen pizza is one of the most heavily specified pieces of fruit in the food supply, and almost none of…
Add olives to a frozen pizza before it goes in, not after, and pat them dry first. That is the whole answer for most people. The…
Olive trees flower every spring, producing tens of thousands of small cream-white blossoms, and roughly 1 to 2 per cent of them become olives. That brutal…
Almost every olive record you will read is a claim rather than a measurement, because the one thing that would settle the big ones, a count…
The black rings on a takeaway pizza are sliced California-style black olives, and they are black because of oxidation and iron, not ripeness. They are picked…
No, olive oil is not a neutral oil, and that is the entire point of it. A neutral oil is one bred or refined to taste…
Olives are at their best in a braise, and at their most easily ruined. Slow, wet heat is the one method that rewards them properly: the…
An olive that is delicious from the jar can wreck a dish, because heat does three things to it: it drives out salt, it softens the…
The olive belongs to the genus Olea, and the one we eat is Olea europaea, a member of the olive family Oleaceae alongside ash, lilac, jasmine…
Its beauty, its origins, its history — the varieties, the fields, the pictures.
“What does lavender have to do with olives? Well — I’m glad you asked. I just love both, and to me they’re the perfect match.”
