Olive pressing

Ever wondered how do you get oil from olives? So did I, and last week I had a chance to find out.

We had a small batch of olives that we harvested from Gerrit's neighbor. Instead of sending them to a commercial press, like he usually does, Gerrit decided to press them by hand.

First, we cleaned the olives. We seperated the leaves from the olives, picked out the rotten olives, and washed them. This was more time consuming and tedious than it sounds, because we did it by hand.

Then, we ground and blended the olives into a thick paste. This was done by machine.

Olives blended into paste

Next, the thick gooey mixture is poured into an olive press. This is a cylinder with a crank at the top, and a hole at the bottom. Turning the crank causes a metal plate to press down on the olive paste, squeezing out all the juice, which comes out from the hole.

Olive press

The juice, which is a mixture of water, oil, and other impurities, is left overnight. This causes the oil to float to the top, while water and impurities sink to the bottom. Finally, the oil is skimmed off the top, and thus we have our extra virgin olive oil.

This is known as extra virgin olive oil because we extracted the oil using only mechanical means, i.e. grinding and pressing. There was no chemical or heat treatment involved. Oil produced this way contains the most anti-oxidants, and is the most nutritious. It also has a strong, almost bitter, taste.

100% pure extra virgin olive oil

Most olive oil production today is done at large commercial presses. The method is still the same, except the pressing is done with large machines. It's too labour intensive to press by hand. After 3 days work, we only produced about 20 liters of oil. I suspect Gerrit only did it because he wanted to "show us young ones how it's done in the good old days".

Left over is fed to the cows. No wasting!