The EEU Relaxes -- According to Some -- Olive Oil Standards
It has been a while since I last wrote about food politics, but La Repubblica recently published a frankly disquieting article about the new regulations governing olive oil that the EEU has adopted, and that will become effective on April 1. According to the article, the EEU is opening the door to inferior olive oils, because in drawing up parameters to define olive oil quality it sets the allowable limit of alcohol esters, which are compounds that form when the olives begin to ferment, with the production of methyl and ethyl alcohol and the release of fatty acids from triglycerides, at 150 mg/kg.In an olive oil made form olives that are properly picked and handled, says the article, which draws from negative comments about the regulations from Slowfood's Carlin Petrini, the alcohol ester concentration will be (except in rare cases) less than 30 mg/kg, and the value is usually considerably lower.
The article (and Carlin) go on to say that the high alcohol ester limits allowed by the regulations open the door to what are called "deodorized" oils, in other words extravirgin oils produced by blending oils pressed from olives that were poorly stored and began to ferment (the resultant oils lack quality oil's beneficial quantities, in particular its antioxidants, and also taste and smell unpleasantly strong -- they don't qualify as extravirgin) with fruitier lots of extravirgin olive oil to obtain an end product olive oil that isn't particularly good, and doesn't have the healthful qualities of oil made from properly kept olives, but can qualify as extravirgin. The chemical evidence for this blending is the high alcohol ester content.
On the face of it, one might be tempted to agree with Carlin in saying that the new regulations, by setting the allowable alcohol ester limits as high as they do, do open the door to poor quality industrially produced and manipulated extravirgin olive oils.
But they don't, because a consumer testing agency visited several Italian supermarkets and artisinal olive presses, purchased inexpensive and expensive extravirgin olive oils, and measured their alcohol ester contents: the cheap industrial oils on the shelves all had high -- on the order of 150 mg/kg -- alcohol ester contents, whereas the artisinal oils had 10-15 mg/kg alcohol ester contents.
In other words, the regulations that will be going into effect take a snapshot of the situation on the ground, as it were. And, IF the regulations require that the olive oil producers
indicate the alcohol ester content on the labels, will provide consumers with a method with which to gauge the quality of the olives that went into the oil. Poorly stored olives will result in higher alcohol ester contents that are indicative of poor quality oil. If the regulations don't require the statistic be printed, Carlin will have a point, though the rules again just recognize the current situation.And this brings up a very important point: with olive oil, as with everything else, you get what you pay for. If you buy a liter of olive oil for less than 5 Euros (in terms of purchasing power this is about 5 dollars), it will be poor quality, because there is no way one can hand-pick olives, rush them to the press, bottle the oil immediately, and sell it for less than 5 Euros/liter without going out of business. Rather, the olive oil producer who sells at these prices will harvest mechanically, or let the olives fall from the trees and vacuum them (yes, people do do this, and by the time they have fallen they are overripe for making quality oil), warehouse the olives, because at these prices one must make high volumes, and then deodorize the oil to make it extravirgin. It's just the way things are.
How to avoid this sort of oil? As I have said before, don't pick the cheapest oil on the shelf. Rather, select an oil that is in a dark bottle (I do like to be able to see it, and therefore don't care as much for cans) that says on the label where the olives came from and when they were pressed. If the label simply says "estate bottled," it could be form a tank truck.
And do, assuming that the new regulations will require it be printed, check the alcohol ester content. I would wonder about an artisinal oil with an alcohol ester content much higher than 30, because it begs two questions: How well were the olives stored, and, if the count is much (much) higher, is the olive oil in the bottle what the label says it is?
The bottom line is that the limit of 150 mg/kg for alcohol esters doesn't open the door to deodorized oils, because that door has been open for a while by now, and closing it would be extremely difficult. However, if the value is printed, you will have an idea of the quality of the olives that went into the oil, and that's a very important thing to know when selecting an oil.
The other thing the consumer organization discovered is potentially more vexing: A significant percentage of the samples were contaminated -- 15% of the samples from artisinal presses had traces of allowed phytopharmaceutical compounds, while 15% had traces of prohibited phytopharmaceuticals, including Fenitrotion, Endosulfan (alfa, beta and sulfate) and Dicofol, which derives from DDT (I would hope there was some overlap, though the organization doesn't say), while 85% (!) of the industrial oils had traces of allowed phytopharmaceuticals, and 35 % (!!) had traces of prohibited phytopharmaceuticals. I find this contamination much more serious than alcohol esters, which are a result of industrial processing, and think the energies of regulators should be directed to eliminating the contamination.Clusone's Orologio Planetario
Moving in a decidedly different direction, this year the folks who organized the Emozioni dal Mondo wine competition took us to visit the city of Clusone, which is located high in the Val Seriana, behind Bergamo. It's located ina perfectly defensable area and for this reason is ancient: the Orbi founded it before 1000 BC, while the Romans, who called it Clausus, because it is hemmed in by the mountains, made it a major defensive bastion, a position it continued to occupy subsequently under the Longobards and Franks, who assigned it to the monks of San Martin of Tours in 774. It passed under the Bishop of Bergamo in 1026, became a Free Commune in the XIII century, and in 1427 went to the Venetians, who invested heavily in the town; because of its beauty and richness Napoleon declared it a city in 1801.The guide who took us around Clusone told us it was an important trading post and was also known for its hemp (used to make cloth, ropes and such) and for its iron and silver mines, and also said it was laid out following the classic Medirval view of society, in concentric levels. The lowest hosted the artisans and tradespeople, while the nobility lived above them. Above the nobility were the palaces of the civil authorities, and the religious buildings are above all -- Santa Maria Assunta, a beautiful, extremely ornate 17th century cathedral whose richness, which rather surprised me given how out-of-the-way Clusone is, shows how important and wealthy the city was, and the Oratorio delle Discipline, which has spectacular frescos of the Triumph of Death and the Danza Macabra
(townspeople dancing with and being led by skeletons) on the façade, painted in 1485 by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis. Giacomo's paintings are especially interesting because these cycles reflect a very brooding view of life -- the grim reminder that death awaits, dictated in part by the great Plague of 1348 -- that faded with the Renaissance, and also because they are much more common in northern Europe than in Italy.
But what really makes Clusone unique is its clock, set into the façade of the Palazzo Comunale, or Town Hall. It was installed in 1583 by Pietro Fanzago and it is much, much more than a clock: it tells time, and rings out the hours, but also gives the phases of the moon, the relative lengths of the nights, the signs of the zodiac, the months, the inclination of the sunlight, and even indicates the position of the sun in the sky -- to perform this last feat, the hand turns counterclockwise, and the clock face is oriented so the hand points to the west in the afternoon.This is a case in which a photo can explain much better than words, so I invite you to look at the picture (the current works are more recent, but you will find several clock works in the town museum).
Put simply, the man was a genius, and it comes as no surprise that after he finished his clock he was summoned to Venice, where he developed a system for dredging the canals.Winding down, Carnevale, or Mardigras is this Tuesday, and we have time for a quick recipe:
Castagnole
The word castagna means chestnut,a nd these fritters do vaguely resemble a chestnut in size and shape. Since they're fairly firm, they can be made in advance if need be.
- The grated zest (yellow part only) of an organically grown lemon
- 4 1/5 cup (500 g) all purpose flour, sifted
- 4 eggs and 4 yolks, beaten
- 1 1/8 cups (225 g) sugar
- 1/2 cup (100 g) unsalted butter, melted
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 2/5 cup milk
- 4 tablespoons Marsala or dry Sherry
- A pinch of salt
- Flour for dusting
- Powdered sugar
- Oil for frying
Whir the sugar and the lemon zest in a blender.
Make a mound of the flour on your work surface and scoop a well into it. Add the sugar, baking powder, and salt, and then use a fork to stir in the eggs, melted butter, milk and Marsala. Work the resulting dough with your hands until it is firm and elastic.
Divide the dough into 6-8 pieces and roll each out into a 3/4 inch (2 cm) diameter snake, cut the snakes into 3/4-inch pieces, roll them between your palms to round them, and set them on a floured surface.
When you are close to finished, set your oil to heating. Fry the castagnole until they are a pretty golden brown, drain them well on absorbent paper, dust them with powdered sugar, and enjoy.
This time's proverb is for Carnevale: E' come un cardo senza sale, far col marito il Carnevale - To spend Carnevale with one's husband is like eating a cardoon without salt.
Kyle Phillips
Editor, The Italian Wine Review
http://www.italianwinereview.com
PS -- Please forward this to anyone you think would enjoy it! If you would like to read past issues (nothing in them really gets stale), you'll find them on the IWR site, through http://www.cosabolle.com.
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