LOCATION AND CLIMATE

 

As you might expect, olives grown in cooler areas where there is more moisture (rainfall and dew) exhibit leaner, more restrained characteristics.  This doesn’t however mean that great oil can now be made in Iceland – you need a minimum amount of sunshine to make your Extra Virgin Olive Oil taste remarkable, similarly to tomatoes or stone fruit.

Olive trees are sensitive to winter freeze (the Casaliva cultivar is more resistant to cold, hence being grown in the Garda region).  It is also easier to farm organically where the climate is more stable and less chemical sprays are required to keep the trees healthy.

OLIVE MATURITY

 

Here’s the thing – all olives are green.  When they become fully mature, they turn black.
Olive maturity at the time of harvest is a major factor in flavour and quality: olives harvested earlier (green olives) feature more bitter, grassy characteristics, with lower yields and with the highest anti-oxidant content.  The oil is a much more intense green colour and has a longer shelf-life.  In terms of production, milling can take longer with green olives (a longer malaxation - the action of slowly churning milled olives to release droplets of oil - is needed and can be more complicated) but the results are far superior!  Don’t choose olive oil from over mature fruit: it lacks all the potential goodness and flavour.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL IN GROVE AND MILL

 

People who care passionately about what they make and follow it personally every day have the capacity to create products with far higher quality, with integrity, and that taste of where they come from.  They are also able to do this by caring for the environment they inhabit.

FRANTOIO DI RIVA BOX

This box contains 6 bottles of extra virgin olive oil made exclusively by Frantoio di Riva from groves on the banks of lake Garda.

Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO green label x 3 bottles (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO organic white label x 1 bottle (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, 46°PARALLELO blue label x 1 bottle (50cl)
Frantoio di Riva, ULIVA Garda Trentino DOP x 1 bottle (50cl)

April 10, 2021 In EVOO, Italophile

A few cookbooks we’ve loved of late

One of the things that most people have had in common during these last very complicated 12 months is the incredible amount of cooking we’ve all had to take on.  Particularly when schools were closed, three meals a day, plus lots of merende were being executed, with very little respite. To be frank, it’s been difficult to keep the imagination and the love for putting together interesting, delicious and healthy food on a daily basis, but luckily we’ve added a considerable amount of cookbooks to our already bulging collection to draw inspiration from. These are a few that really hit the spot for us.

 

Gill Meller’s Root, Stem Leaf, Flower is perhaps one of the most beautiful cookbooks we’ve ever seen. The recipes and pictures are all incredibly seductive and presented in such a stunning way that we’ve felt compelled to try to do all of them.  There is a great simplicity in each dish, but astounding amount of flavour.  We write about “a spring soup” and just how perfect it is, here.

 

On the other spectrum of simplicity is Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage’s Ottolenghi Flavour. We’ve been super fans of his since discovering his Islington shop and restaurant many years ago and his books have accompanied our multiple house moves. However, perhaps finally we’ve lost any fear in approaching his recipes and replacing ingredients that we couldn’t find with others.  Given the quantity of processes in most of his recipes, we’ve start seeing it almost as a meditative task, worrying less about the actual process and more about the flavour layering.  This book is more than a recipe book, it’s an exploration of how to make food (vegetables in this case) taste so good, all of which is illustrated by recipes. The one we’ve enjoyed doing the most is ‘Pappa al Pomodoro with Lime and Mustard Seeds’, for the flavour, but also for the sensation of it, since in its pure form, pappa al pomodoro is one of the most quintessential Tuscan dishes you can find.

 

Meera Sodha’s East has been a marvellous inclusion in our library. Living where we do, not being able to travel even just to Florence means that we are starved of Asian flavour compositions. This book has helped us start to be more bold in our table journeys across India, China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and all other places in Asia we haven’t even been able to dream of, let alone make window travel plans. Her ‘Caramelized Onion and Chilli Ramen’ became a weekly ritual in our household during this long winter.

 

April Bloomfield’s A Girl and her Greens (was published a few years ago, but only discovered by us recently. Our journey towards more of a plant based diet was helped by her writing and deliciously vibrant and endearing recipes. More please seems to be the prevailing response.

 

The only book in this list that is not expressly vegetarian is Letitia Ann Clark’s Bitter Honey.  She was kind enough to grant us an interview where she talks about Sardinia and her journey there, but her book is an absolutely lovely journey through what and how Sardinias eat. The writing is beautiful as it transports you across the Med towards this ancient land. So far our favourite recipe is ‘Fregola with Clams and Fennel.’