An encyclopedia, true stories the sellers won’t tell you, and notes in two languages. From someone who spent twenty years in the trade and has nothing left to sell.
The black rings on a takeaway pizza are sliced California-style black olives, and they are black because of oxidation and iron, not ripeness. They are picked…
No, olive oil is not a neutral oil, and that is the entire point of it. A neutral oil is one bred or refined to taste…
Olives are at their best in a braise, and at their most easily ruined. Slow, wet heat is the one method that rewards them properly: the…
An olive that is delicious from the jar can wreck a dish, because heat does three things to it: it drives out salt, it softens the…
The olive belongs to the genus Olea, and the one we eat is Olea europaea, a member of the olive family Oleaceae alongside ash, lilac, jasmine…
Kalamata olives are excellent on pizza, and they ruin more pizzas than any other olive. Both statements are true, and the difference between them comes down…
Black olives blend in, green olives stand out. That is the whole decision in six words, and it is a decision about the rest of the…
The short answer: reach for dry, salty-friendly wines with real acidity and skip anything sweet or heavily oaked. A crisp fino or manzanilla sherry is the…
Olive trees live for centuries — often several hundred years, and in rare cases well over a thousand — because they can endlessly regenerate themselves from…
Oleic acid is the single fatty acid that makes olive oil what it is. It accounts for roughly 55 to 83 per cent of the fat…
Olives are salty because raw olives are far too bitter to eat, and salt is the workhorse that fixes that. Straight off the tree an olive…
Those glossy, uniformly jet-black olives in the tin aren’t black because they ripened on the tree that way — they’re black because of oxygen and a…
Its beauty, its origins, its history — the varieties, the fields, the pictures.
“What does lavender have to do with olives? Well — I’m glad you asked. I just love both, and to me they’re the perfect match.”