As you can imagine, in our house we always have extra virgin olive oil. From being a luxury item in my parent’s household when I was a kid, it’s THE oil we use for cooking in our home now. Every time Steve goes to the oil mill where GringoCool EVOO is bottled, he buys a gallon of non-filtered EVOO which is very good for your palate, and have the same health benefits, but doesn’t have such a long shelf life as the filtered one (He mentioned that in a video we made not too long ago). Once in a while, when he or I travel, we arrive with a bottle of EVOO from another place in Spain or another country.
The other day I was having a salad, and tried one of those EVOO, and immediately I returned to use one of our own. I was wondering why, it didn’t matter how many EVOO I was trying, I was always liking better ours. And it was a genuine thought, not just because I wanted people to buy our product more. I was alone in my kitchen, tasting and wondering.
I decided to do a little bit of research on that end, just to understand why I like unbiasedly GringoCool so much, and educate myself since I decided to embark in helping Steve to succeed with his business. I grabbed a book I gave Steve last Spring, Manual de cata y maridaje del aceite de oliva (Handbook for tasting and pairing olive oil) by M. Uceda, M.P. Aguilera & I. Mazzucchelli which is a classic among the Spanish olive oil connoisseurs, and a new revised edition was released last year. Even though it’s an easy book to read in Spanish, it has some technicalities, and I knew it was just accumulating dust in my second language learner husband’s shelf.
I found the perfect chapter for my queries. Chapter 4 is dedicated entirely to the factors that affect the quality of EVOO (pp. 45-71). After reading the chapter, I came up with an infographic with 12 main factors that affect the EVOO quality, being 6 of them while cultivating and harvesting olives until they arrive to the mill, and the other 6 while the olives arrive at the mill, are processed, and final EVOO product is ready to be bottled.
In the coming days, I will be talking more in detail about each one of the factors, and how they relate to my bias and unbiased relationship with GringoCool EVOO.
