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.
The short answer: reach for dry, salty-friendly wines with real acidity and skip anything sweet or heavily oaked. A crisp fino or manzanilla sherry is the…
Olive trees live for centuries — often several hundred years, and in rare cases well over a thousand — because they can endlessly regenerate themselves from…
Oleic acid is the single fatty acid that makes olive oil what it is. It accounts for roughly 55 to 83 per cent of the fat…
Olives are salty because raw olives are far too bitter to eat, and salt is the workhorse that fixes that. Straight off the tree an olive…
Those glossy, uniformly jet-black olives in the tin aren’t black because they ripened on the tree that way — they’re black because of oxygen and a…
In the Northern Hemisphere, olives are harvested from around October through December or January, with the exact window depending on where the grove sits, the variety,…
The Taggiasca is a small, brownish-purple Ligurian olive with thin flesh and a proportionally large stone. That awkward ratio is exactly why it is prized, and…
The short answer: serve olives alongside salty cheese, crusty bread, cured meats and a crisp, dry drink — the same building blocks you’d find on any…
Don’t tip that cloudy liquid down the sink. Leftover olive brine is a ready-made seasoning — salty, tangy and savoury all at once — and it…
Pomace olive oil is the lowest grade of olive oil, extracted from the leftover pulp, skins and crushed stones (the “pomace”) after the good oil has…
Oleuropein is the natural phenolic compound that makes a raw olive taste so mouth-puckeringly bitter you’ll want to spit it straight out. It’s concentrated in the…
Mild California black olives keep the peace on a family pizza; pitted Kalamata or firm Castelvetrano bring real depth. Here's how to match the olive to…
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.”