After harvesting comes pressing!
Have you ever wondered how our small, colorful olives become our organic olive oil? Then you've come to the right place! After our harvest , today we'll tell you about our high-quality processing and important details that make our oil a truly delicious organic olive oil.
Contents:
- The first steps after the olive harvest
- How olives become olive oil
- The finished olive oil
- Now conjure up a delicious dish with your Corovita organic olive oil
The first steps after the olive harvest
The harvesting and processing processes flow seamlessly into one another, as olive oil production should ideally take place immediately after the harvest. Direct processing ensures the olives are in the best possible condition, as no brown spots or rot have yet developed. This goes hand in hand with the high quality of olive oil.
First of all, the olives must be cleaned. During harvesting, not only the fruit is removed from the trees, but also leaves and small branches. These are collected and separated from the olives using a large vacuum cleaner set to keep the olives on the conveyor belt.
In the second step of cleaning, the olives are placed in a water bath to remove any coarse dirt and mud that may still be on the olives and to ensure the cleanest possible material for the next steps.
How olives become olive oil
First, the clean olives are ground into a smooth paste. The entire fruit, including the flesh, skin, and pit, is pressed through a rapidly rotating sieve. The resulting paste is then slowly stirred to loosen it and allowed to rest for a while before moving on to the next stage of olive paste production.
The next step is decanting. Here, the previously prepared paste is poured into a large centrifuge drum, where rapid rotation separates the solids from the liquids. At the end, the producer is left with two products: a nearly dry mass, which is further used as biomass, and an oil-water mixture, which is further processed into oil.
Fun fact: Ever wondered what the term "cold-pressed" means? This term refers to oils that don't get warmer than 28°C (82°F) during decanting. Many producers use a higher temperature because this allows for more oil to be extracted, but this also results in a significant loss of olive oil's healthy nutrients.
At Corovita, we naturally want to preserve as many of the good ingredients as possible and promise a high-quality, cold-pressed organic olive oil that will delight not only your kitchen but also your taste buds!
Finally, the liquid mixture of water and oil is separated into its individual components, so that the producer is left with some water and can then store the pure oil.
The finished olive oil
Typically, the finished olive oil is placed in stainless steel containers after processing and stored in a cool, dark place, just like in your kitchen. The olive oil is then ready for bottling, shipping, and sale.
Interestingly, the designation "extra virgin" is not a quality that the oil can acquire during its production process, but rather a quality criterion. It states that the oil has no flavor defects and a free fatty acid content of no more than 0.8%. These requirements, similar to organic certification, are regularly verified by specialized testers approved in the EU.
Now conjure up a delicious dish with your Corovita organic olive oil
Although olive oil has a fairly standardized production process, it's fortunately extremely versatile in its uses! Perfect for baked potatoes, delicious salads, and the like—and if you ever run out of ideas for how to make your dishes shine with our oil, we have plenty of inspiration in our recipe collection !
Hopefully, we were able to explain the production process of our olive oil and answer your questions! If you're interested in how our olives are grown or have other questions about organic olive oil, you can find a wealth of useful information on our blog !
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