House Olive Oil

[Tony S]

I went ahead and ordered the Carli "fruttato" six pack. Thanks, @newfydog. At that price with free shipping it's almost cheap enough to cook with if I'm not enamored.

 

[David Chaus]

Do I not, by now, have "insufferable purist" effectively embossed into my signature?

Actually you do not. It may be implicit in the content of your posts, but it is not in your signature.

You may want to, though.

 

[dbostedo]

...implicit in the content of your posts...

Hence the qualifier, "effectively"...

 

[Tony S]

Hence the qualifier, "effectively"...

I do like a good reader.

 

[Tony S]

Annnnd ... Here come the olive oil ads!

 

[Tony S]

Following up with a half-baked epilogue.

The Carli oil did arrive, after a kerfuffle around the shipping. (See screenshot from around August 9.) Basically their customer service is, shall we say, Italian. (Note that my heritage allows me to make this slam in public.)

Eventually I did a very informal tasting with what @cantunamunch calls "Herself". It was somewhat inconclusive, mostly because we didn't have a bottle of our standard-bearer Portuguese Cobrancosa as a control. Also, as you will have seen, I did not manage to scrounge up matching dishes for color comparisons.

Three of the four oils in the photo are labeled "Organic." (The Carli is the outlier here.) We thought all four were tasty and none was off-putting. Bottom line is that the Whole Foods blend blew away the others as a value proposition. Going forward, after we use all this stuff up, I think I'm going to stock the Cobrancosa (not pictured) as a "special" bottle for toppings and stick with the Whole Foods for everything else.

PS: How could the "Paesano" NOT be a Mob product?

 

[cantunamunch]

what do you mean by 'lift'?

 

[Tony S]

what do you mean by 'lift'?

I can't tell whether you're pulling my chain, but basically that it has enough crisp / fresh / bright / acid notes to balance out the intrinsic richness of something that is, after all pure fat.

The notes are just there to call out some of the minor differences. In reality the Whole Foods and the Nunez were quite similar to each other, in that they had more "green" smells and tastes that I happen to like. The Paesano and the Carli were more nutty and, again, similar to each other.

 

[cantunamunch]

I can't tell whether you're pulling my chain, but basically that it has enough crisp / fresh / bright / acid notes to balance out the intrinsic richness of something that is, after all pure fat.

Perfectly straightforward question. I might have construed "lift" as pure aromatics, possibly related to the mint you have in the other rubric. Or as a valuation of mid-palate intensity (everything stacks up on the mid-palate and tapers off everywhere else). Apparently it is not either of those, though it may lie adjacent thereto.

You distinguish between butter and ghee, which, for some, is a miniscule distinction, so there was an implicit question of scale in there too. Scale is important. From your response context, for example, I would eliminate some values on the 'acid' scale, like the minerally acidic citrus of Canadian Vidal.

 

[Tony S]

You distinguish between butter and ghee

LOL. You give me way too much credit. I said "ghee"; she said "butter". Whatever. Splitting hairs. It's just freaking olive oil and I am far from being an authority on it.

 

[cantunamunch]

Splitting hairs. It's just freaking olive oil and I am far from being an authority on it.

Well, so long as you had fun splitting them

 

[newboots]

The "Italian" customer service note was priceless.

 

[Lorenzzo]

I’m way late to this thread but this is what I use. It’s kinda old and getting older but has life-saving properties in fact they made a movie about it.

 

[Tony S]

I’m way late to this thread but this is what I use. It’s kinda old and getting older but has life-saving properties in fact they made a movie about it.

View attachment 143394

 

[James]

Basically their customer service is, shall we say, Italian.

This is why Blossoms are what they are and VIST basically disappeared in the US. I knew a dealer for Vist, and after a few years he just couldn’t deal with the hassle.
I get the sense that selling ridiculously priced clothing in Italy fits their customer shrug and hand wave model better.

 

[cantunamunch]

This...is going to surprise absolutely no one in this thread.

 

[Lorenzzo]

When I see connoisseurs deliberating over olive oil, I think back to my time doing bus in China when what you really hoped for was that the oil your food was prepared in hadn’t been syphoned from the gutter which was believed to be a common practice.

 

[cantunamunch]

syphoned from the gutter.

'lift'

 

[James]

This...is going to surprise absolutely no one in this thread.

In 2008 we did one of those factory tour days . So it was an Italian guy with a van who knows people. Pagani, Lambo, Ferrari (only museum tour), and Ducati was the last. Wanted to do Maserati too, but convincing most of the others why it’s a great idea to do like 9 hrs of factory tours proved too much.

After the final tour, he gave his friend, our tour guide at Ducati, a ride home with us. In talking to her, it was a pretty rough and impossible situation for young engineers in Italy at that time. As I recall, they might make 1k euros a month as a young engineer.

 

[wooglin]

Isn’t organic olive oil like organic maple syrup? As in, if it’s not organic it’s not actually olive oil or not actually maple syrup?