With all the hype these days about using olive oil for cooking, for salads, for hair and skin massage, super market shelves are loaded with all kinds of local and imported brands screaming out their qualities and benefits to you in an attempt to get you to pick them over the competition.

Watch a cooking show and they are virtually emptying cans of olive oil in pans or drizzling it over everything and anything edible. In fact, it seems that as butter went out of our diets, olive oil crept in.

Due to its powerful anti-oxidant and vitamin E content, health and fitness gurus promise us that olive oil is heart healthy, prevents cancer, blood pressure, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, so we are ready to get the biggest pack available. While connoisseurs are willing to pay steep prices for high quality olive oil, the types and qualities of olive oil is quite baffling. So, without further ado, let’s demystify the olive.

All olive oil is not created equal

Extra virgin: It is considered “extra virgin” when it has been produced by a simple pressing of the olives without using chemicals and other processes for extraction. Extra virgin must meet certain tests on acidity and levels of peroxide. Finally, extra virgin olive oil must taste like olives and its taste must be unaltered, just like pure fruit juice.

First cold-press: This is the process used for making extra virgin olive oil meaning that olives pressed on the first round of extraction are kept at a temperature no higher than 81.9 °F, and “pressed” of course refers to the method of extraction. This method indicates that no heat or chemical additives were used to extract the oil from the olives, as these can destroy the flavours and aromas of the olive oil.

Stone pressed: When olive oil is extracted using a traditional stone mill.

Ice pressed: When olives are pressed in the complete absence of heat and the mechanism is kept over 20 times colder by the use of ice, hence maintaining the oil’s maximum nutritive and healing potential.  

Pomace is the ground flesh and pits left after the extraction process. Oil of a lesser grade and quality which is extracted with chemicals used in the process is known as olive-pomace oil.

Refined: Olive oil obtained from treating low quality or defective virgin olive oils by refining methods such as charcoal and other chemical and physical filters.

Now that we are done with what means quality and what doesn’t, let’s go through some tips for buying olive oil:

• Choose bottles or containers that protect against light, and buy a quantity that you’ll use up quickly because olive oil is perishable and when you have opened the bottle, the decline in quality begins.

• Don’t worry about colour. Good oils come in all shades, from green to gold to pale straw — but avoid flavours that are a bit mouldy, cooked, greasy, meaty, metallic or insipid.

• Except “extra virgin”, other categories like “pure” or “light” oil, ‘olive oil” and “olive pomace oil” — have undergone chemical refinement.

• Do look at the “best by” date which should be two years after the oil was bottled.

• Commonly used terms such as “first pressed” and “cold pressed” are gimmicky mostly because most extra virgin oil nowadays is made with centrifuges, it isn’t “pressed” at all, and true extra virgin oil comes exclusively from the first processing of the olive paste.

It is said that oils that are high in monounsaturated fat get thick and cloudy when you put them in the fridge but oils that are high in polyunsaturated fats (such as soybean oil) don’t. The fridge test to check if your olive oil is real or fake is not reliable because some varieties of olive oil will get cloudy and some won’t.

Lastly, olive oil consumption should be limited because brown bread dipping in olive oil might taste yummy to the lips but could go straight to the hips as olive oil is concentrated in calories. A tablespoon of white sugar contains 50 calories whereas olive oil contains 120. It is pure 100 per cent fat with no fibre and almost no nutrients. Whatever your intake, make sure you burn it off.

On the other hand 10 medium olives have 40 calories, contain some fibre but beware of high sodium content in the preservatives.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 20th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play