How to Taste Olive Oil Like a Pro
Professional olive-oil tasters slurp it from little blue glasses and talk about “pungency” and “fustiness.” It looks absurd, and it’s genuinely useful. Here is how to taste oil properly — and what you’re tasting for.
You don’t need to be an expert to taste olive oil well — you just need to know the ritual and the three things to look for. Do it once and you’ll never buy blind again.
The method
Pour a little oil into a small glass — pros use blue glass so the colour can’t bias them (colour tells you nothing about quality). Cup it in one hand, cover with the other, and warm it for a minute to release the aromas. Uncover and smell: you want fresh, green, fruity notes — cut grass, tomato leaf, almond, apple. Then take a small sip and slurp air through it (the technical word is strippaggio) to spray it across your whole palate.
The three things you’re judging
A good extra virgin should have all three: fruitiness (the fresh-olive flavour), bitterness (on the tongue), and pungency — that peppery sting at the back of the throat that can make you cough. Those last two aren’t flaws; they’re the antioxidant polyphenols, the sign of a fresh, healthy, living oil.
Tasting is mostly about spotting faults the marketing hides. Learn three: rancid (old crayons, stale nuts — the oil is simply old), fusty (sweaty, swampy — the olives fermented in heaps before pressing), and musty (damp cardboard, mould). A shocking amount of supermarket “extra virgin” has one of these — and once you can name them, you can’t un-taste them. A flat, greasy oil with no fruit, no bitterness and no pepper isn’t mild; it’s dead. Chase the peppery cough; it’s the good stuff.