PART XXVI: MAKING OLIVE OIL (10/25)

We had the amazing opportunity to pick olives from the trees in a small grove just down the hill from Coldigioco and then bring them to a local pressing facility to make our own olive oil.

"So how do we get those off of there and into a box?"

Using various hand rakes and whatnot to pull the olives off the branches. The fruits are allowed to fall onto the net on the ground and then once the whole tree is picked, the net is emptied into a box for transport. The olives were actually quite reluctant to let go off their branches.

Travis revelling in our productivity.

At the pressing facility Alison and Carly empty our Mignola olives into a larger bin for storage until the next day when they will actually be pressed. Because of the timing in the season there was not enough demand the day we went to start up the machines.

Raw olives are incredibly bitter, and Mignola make some of the most bitter olive oil.

First the olives are dumped in this hopper.

The next machine sifts the leaves out of the mixture.

These immense granite wheels crush the olives, pits and all, into a fine paste.

The paste is spread on layers of woven nylon and stacked on these spindles with a metal plate between every five layers. The woven layers used to be made out of coconut fibers because that is one of the few natural fibers strong enough to resist tearing under such a powerful force. The stacks are then wheeled beneath the six ton presses you see here and the oil squeezes out of the sides and middle and gathers in the bottom tray.

Our guide through the facility explains the last step of the process when the oil is pumped to this centrifuge to have the water separated from it and out the other end comes local, organic olive oil!

 

The wasted mash is washed off the nylon layers and the broken bits of olive pits are separated to be burned in the facility's pellet stove. Apparently the pits give off about 8 times more heat than burning wood.

We also had a little olive oil tasting. We tried these eight oils, which included a range of bitter oils, two blended oils (standard olive oil), and two oils infused with lemon and orange. The lemon one was tremendous and would have gone tremendously on fried fish. I also really liked the very bitter Mignola olive oil we made because it opened up a new dimension of oil that I never knew existed. Isn't that the way with so many things on a trip like this?