Hey, Taste-Test This: Olive Oil

About author / Christine Gable

Culinary enthusiast; kids cuisine and slow cooking; magazine recipe developer; professional writer. Her simple recipes are great for family dinners.

Seems each summer I get a brainy idea to do some taste testing. Remember when we did the hot dog taste tests the other year? All I had to do was buy a whole bunch of different kinds and then coordinate the test day and the toothpicks and labels so that I could keep all the kinds straight.

Try, taste and rate—the fun, fun, fun part of any taste-testing endeavor. If you’ve got some organizer in you, it can even be fun to make up some rating papers with the different “mystery items” and a range of numbers for rating, complete with a space for personalized comments. Or not.

That’s only for the organized taste testers. And that just wasn’t happening this time around, suffice it to say. You see, I just happened to be at a discount grocery store getting our necessary grocery shopping done (Mark that off the to-do list, right?). Well, I happened to see several different types of olive oil on the shelf. One of them caught my eye: Ollo. Hmmm, wasn’t that the same brand that I had just read a review about?

Yes, yes … I think so! It’s the Australian olive oil that’s rivaling the Italian ones.

So I bought some bottles—plus some Colavita, Carapelli, Filippo Berio … you name it, even Piggly Wiggly. In both extra virgin and light varieties. Driving home I hatched a plan: how about if we set up a small taste test with some of that crusty sourdough bread that we had on the counter at home (Added bonus: a good way to use it up before mold sets in!). Come to think of it, that might just be the ticket to rounding out the soup and salad that we could have for dinner.

And it would give us all a chance to get down and dirty with olive oil—you know, get to know it better since I’m usually just tossing it in with salads and mixing it up in other concoctions.

After all, don’t we all hear about the “heart healthy” benefits of olive oil ‘round the clock now? Seems like everywhere we turn, we’re being implored to stay away from trans fats and embrace monounsaturated ones. But for those of us who grew up here in America, eating a traditional American diet, we may not have had the opportunity to even taste olive oil in the regular course of our days, much less try different brands and form an opinion about our favorite.

Hey, it’s never too late! And if you have kids in your household, even better. Let them see you being willing to try something new, to experiment and explore and stretch a bit. Plus, it’s just good ol' fashioned fun to do this together. Really. And it’s less work than it seems—once you get in there and start doing it, the kids are with ya. No matter what sort of food you decide to taste test, it’s a sure-fire way to get kids interested and involved—and most importantly—dialoging about food!

Olive oil has been an important part of the human diet for thousands of years, with the earliest usage dating to 6000 BC. Olive oil is known to have its own texture, color, taste and characteristics that vary depending upon where it’s been grown and how it’s been handled.

Extra virgin is the oil from the first mechanical pressing of ripe, hand-picked olives that has an acid count of less than one percent. Basically, the less acid in the oil, the more mellow and delightful the flavor.

So how did our official olive oil taste testing go? Quite well actually. And we learned so much. We learned that some brands have a distinctly smooth and mellow flavor. Others more of a bitter edge that left a slight tang in the mouth. Some tasted of sun-warmed olive hillsides—others had no flavor whatsoever.

But one thing that I came away with—besides total satisfaction from the meal (hey, it was that healthy fat, wasn’t it?!)—was the discovery that we all agreed. We all had just two or three favorites: the mellow, sunny ones. And we all found the bitter ones less appealing.

So now I look at olive oil in a whole new way—I don’t just buy by price (although that certainly holds weight!). No, now I look beyond the label and remember our taste-testing time together. Of course, I won’t be buying olive oil for quite some time—there’s a good supply on our shelf, thanks to the discount store and our taste testing trials.