SHE at the table. – Daniel Bodenheimer Morales, you are an agri-energy engineer by training but also an oleologist…
Daniel Bodenheimer Morales. – I am of Spanish origin and I grew up between Paris and Seville, in the world of olive oil. As in many parts of the Mediterranean, olive oil is a central product. I am specialized in renewable energy, but also in oleology thanks to my meeting with a producer from the south of Spain, my mentor, José Luis Garcia Ramirez. This is what led me to specialize in oleology, olive oil tasting, but also olive growing, the production of olive oil. With my childhood friend and partner Fémi Faure, who was immersed in the world of gastronomy, after meeting José Luis, we wanted to highlight his products and olive oil in general in France.
SHE at the table. – When choosing your olive oil, there are several statements that appear on the bottles. What does extra-virgin olive oil mean?
DBM- Virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oilor plain olive oilare the three quality categories of olive oil that exist. They are classified mainly according to acidity, it is an indicator of the purity and quality of an olive oil. The more extra-virgin an olive oil is compared to a virgin or an oil without appellation, the more we will have a guarantee of low acidity, organoleptic quality, and therefore taste quality. The objective as a consumer is to always move towards extra-virgin oils, which are the best for our body, with the best taste. Virgin olive oils and olive oils without a name, which are sometimes called “lampantes” (coming from the word “oil lamp” because this oil was used for these lightings), are oils which have less guarantees of quality. For several decades, the agricultural sector has been moving more and more towards almost exclusive production of extra-virgin, this is the quality standard par excellence.
There is a belief that if you heat olive oil, it could be carcinogenic. This is completely false.
SHE at the table. – What does first cold pressing mean?
DBM- Today, the expression “ first cold pressing ”, is a little outdated. This made sense historically, but today it is more of a marketing argument.
How is olive oil produced? We harvest olives, we take them to the mill, we press them or crush them. Then, we separate the liquid material from the organic matter. And the liquid material becomes olive oil.
Today, there are almost no mills that operate using a press system. All the mills have a centrifugal crushing system apart from a few ancestral exhibition mills. Today, when saying “first cold pressing”, in the majority of cases, there is at least one word that has no meaning, it is the word “press”. There is no controlled or protected designation for using this word, so we can use it whatever we want. On the other hand, in the rest of the expression, there is first cold pressing. Today, we say instead “ cold extraction ”, the word “cold” makes sense. The goal is to stay below 27°C throughout the entire process at the mill. But it’s not easy because a mill is a centrifuge, a crusher, a crusher, these are substantial mechanical objects that must be rotated very slowly so that the olive paste never exceeds 27°C. . There is a lot of water in the olive. The more you heat the olive paste, the easier it will be to extract the water from the olive. This low temperature preserves the properties and taste of the olive oil. Below 27°C, this is cold extraction and a marker of quality, the olive has been little damaged and has been preserved.
SHE at the table. – What is the difference between cooking oils and seasoning oils?
DBM- There are two large families, two ranges of olive oil: cooking oils and seasoning oils.
There are two uses for the same product depending on quality and purity. Cooking oils are olive oils that are used for searing or frying, therefore heating. There is a belief that if you heat olive oil, it could be carcinogenic. This is completely false. The smoke point of olive oil is 190°C while that of butter is 120/130°C. We can therefore cook olive oil without any health risk. Another point, when we cook olive oil, we lose the taste, so we use oils that are quite low-end, not even extra-virgin, but simply virgin.
There is another category of oil that is the great vintages of olive oil: seasoning oils with cold extraction. These seasoning olive oils are often sold in the form of glass or other bottles. They must be used for seasoning.
Unemployment of olives is a technique that our neighbors do not necessarily envy, which triggers a fermentation process
SHE at the table. – What is the difference between green, ripe, and black fruit?
DBM- For wine, we have three main categories and all French consumers know that there is red, white and rosé. In olive oil, there are three fruits: green, ripe and black. There are two on one side and a third a little apart in his world.
The first two are a bit of a binary: they are green fruity and ripe fruity. You should know that the green olives and black olives that we consume come from the same varieties, they are not green or black olives depending on the tree. They change from green to black.
THE fruity green is an olive oil produced from very young, green olives, harvested early in the season. This gives a green fruitiness with very herbaceous tastes, notes of tomatoes, fresh grass, olive branches, something vegetal, raw.
For the ripe fruitythese will be olive oils produced from olives which have lived through the entire winter period, and will be black and wrinkled. This ripe olive oil is much more about the cooked vegetable, something candied, rounder, much less raw and vegetal. These two oils come from the same olives, but depending on when we harvest them, we will have one product or another.
There is a third category of fruity, a little alone in its world, it is the dark fruity. It’s really something Franco-French, produced in the South of France. This is also called old-fashioned unemployment. Olive unemployment is a technique that our neighbors do not necessarily envy. In green or ripe olive oil, to have quality, in addition to cold extraction, we try to have the minimum time between the harvest of the olives and the pressing/extraction, ideally 3 to 4 hours. For old-fashioned unemployment, we do the opposite and allow around ten days to pass between the harvest of the olives and their passage through the mill, to initiate a fermentation process. This gives a little dash of black tapenade, very candied. It’s really characteristic of the South, which we love a lot in France but which is not at all done outside, in Europe.
In summary, green fruity or ripe fruity depending on the harvest date, and black fruity which is a French technique for which the olives are fermented for around ten days.
SHE at the table. – What are the good associations with each fruit?
DBM- On cooking oils, there is very little fruitiness.
For the best combinations, we are interested in accompanying oils.
For green, herbaceous and vegetal fruitiness, it is combined with cut vegetables, raw peppers, summer salads, tomatoes, mozzarella. Everything that recalls this very summery side.
Green fruitiness has a higher intensity than other fruitinesses. The olives are harvested very early in the season. The green fruitiness is therefore much stronger in terms of intensity than the rest of the fruitiness. When you put a good green fruity seasoning in a dish, it’s really present.
In certain dishes, we don’t necessarily want green fruit to take up all the space, so we focus instead on ripe fruit, in desserts, or fish fresh from the oven. We add it as a finish, and not before because if we cook the olive oil, we lose its taste. With meat, I rather recommend matured black which is a bit like a very good red wine that you put in a beef bourguignon dish or in a sauce. This virgin, black olive oil gives character and strength to the dish. Like green fruit, if you put black matured wine on the plate, you can smell it because it has a very strong taste.
In summary, green is more for vegetables, black for meat dishes, and ripe for fish. Ripe is the most versatile because it is the least intense in terms of taste.
Olive oil is a perishable product, you cannot keep it for decades, 1 or 2 years maximum.
SHE at the table. – What are the mistakes to avoid with olive oil?
DBM- Production and expiry errors. Olive oil has a shelf life of 1 or 2 years depending on the variety. It is linked to polyphenols, antioxidants very good for health, present in olive oil. The more there is, the longer the oil lasts, it is a protective barrier. When buying or using olive oil, you should always look at the date it was produced. Ideally, you should use olive oils from the year. We will return in 2025, so we must use oils from olives harvested at the end of 2024, the season extending from September to December.
SHE at the table. – You are attached to the principle of agroecology. Can you explain to us what this involves?
DBM- The concept of agroecology is to say that agriculture and ecology, the preservation of living things and biodiversity form a whole. This notion was theorized at the end of the 20th century, in South America, particularly in Colombia, by researchers who worked on farms. The objective is to take into account the entire agricultural system of the farm, and not only see the farm as a productive system to have a system that is as self-sufficient as possible. To do this, we look for synergies and complementarities in the different components of the farm. Concretely, how does this materialize? Having several varieties, several different crops in rotation within the same farm that feed each other. For example, in the case of olive growing, you can have olive trees and land that is bare, or you can also have olive trees and plant fava beans or other products that bring nitrogen to the soil. This is called plant cover.
The final goal of agroecology is to enrich the soil. Soils are the common capital of humanity since there is a large part of the organic matter from around the world present there. The soils are about 1 meter deep on average and this is where everything comes into play: the whole transformation of the deterioration of organic matter into nitrogen, which will then be transformed and supplied to the plants. The objective of agroecology is to work the soil by stripping it as little as possible, to regenerate it as much as possible and for this capital to be increasingly productive.
SHE at the table. – Can you tell us about your workshop with Wecandoo?
DBM- These are olive oil tasting workshops which are introductions to olive oil tasting. For 2 hours, we taste three fruits, one green fruit, one ripe fruit, one dark fruit, during which we discuss and ask questions to learn more about this product.
Relinquo, oil cellar
Opening soon at 80, rue des Haies, 75020 Paris
@relinquo_caviste
Workshops on Wecandoo
https://wecandoo.fr/
