The best Italian Taggiasca olives are the ones that name the variety, come from Liguria (ideally with the new "Olive Taggiasche Liguri" IGP seal), and list nothing but olives, water, salt and perhaps olive oil. Brand matters far less than those three checks. The Taggiasca is a small, brownish-purple Ligurian olive with thin flesh and a proportionally large stone, and…
Read the story →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…
September 15, 2026Most olive allergies are to the pollen, not the fruit or oil. Symptoms of all 3, whether you can still eat olives, and which tests to ask a doctor about.
September 11, 2026The 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 that work is visible…
September 10, 2026Straight off the tree, an olive is inedible — bitter enough to make you wince. Curing is how we fix that, and you can do it at home…
Kalamata are ripened and brine-cured. Tinned black olives are picked green and oxidised. Why one tastes of wine and the other of almost nothing.
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 flesh, and…
In a village in Crete stands an olive tree up to 4,000 years old — still making olives. A timeline of everything it has outlived, and the one…
Comment la Californie est passée d'arrière-pays de l'olive à vrai pays de l'huile : l'histoire des vergers en haie et des…
Long before it was a kitchen staple, olive oil was money, medicine, light and sacrament. A look at why the…
Olive leaf has a long folk reputation and some real, modest evidence for blood pressure — but the leaf is…
A large olive oil spill into a city harbour sounds harmless — it is food, after all. The truth is…
The world's thirst for cheap olive oil has reshaped the land that grows it. Here is the real environmental cost…
How a small importer turns Spanish olives into chocolate, cosmetics and pate — and what the boom in olive-oil spin-offs…
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.”
