OLIVE OIL MADE IN CALABRIAOlive oil is one of the main products for the

development of calabria. Making olive oil is a simple process, time is essential when you are making high

quality olive oil. When an olive leaves the tree, it begins to deteriorate. The best olive oil is made

within hours of harvest.

Olives can be harvested in many ways, and all of them can yield excellent olive oil if the fruit is processed immediately. Hand harvest is the

oldest and most expensive method, but nowadays machines make the work and shake the trunks of the trees .Larger machines also use a row of bars to beat the sides of the trees

and dislodge the fruit into a collector.

Once the olives are harvested they must be rushed to the mill. Really rushed. Speedy processing is essential for making good olive oil; the sooner you mill, the less the fruit will deteriorate. At the mill, leaves and sticks are removed from the olives, and the fruit is washed. From the washer it goes to a grinder that creates a paste.

From the grinder, the paste goes into a tank for malaxation. In malaxation, the olive paste is stirred slowly with paddles to help reverse the homogenization that takes place during grinding. The small droplets of oil are coaxed together into larger droplets to help the separation process. Malaxation usually takes from 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the character of the paste.

From the malaxation tank, the olive paste is pumped to the decanter. A centrifugal decanter is the standard method of separating the olive oil from everything else—fruit water, pit fragments and pulp. The traditional method of separation was a press that used mats (imagine a round placemat with a hole in the middle), spread with olive paste and squeezed to release the oil and water. The solids stayed behind on the mats. The problem with this picturesque method is that a mat, even one made from a man-made material, is about as easy to clean as an oil and olive paste-saturated carpet, which often times leads to contamination of the oil. Cleanliness is everything in olive oil processing, so the use of mats introduces an unwelcome opportunity for defects to get into the oil.

In a decanter, separation that takes hours with just gravity is done in seconds. The olive paste is spun at high speeds to separate the different parts: solids (heaviest), fruit water and olive oil (lightest). The olive oil is pulled out of the decanter and sent for a final cleaning in the vertical separator. The solids and fruit water are sent for disposal, composting, etc.

The final cleaning of the olive oil is sometimes called polishing. It involves another centrifuging, this time in a modified cream separator. The last traces of fruit water and particles are removed and the fresh olive oil is ready for settling or filtration. Or you can just grab a piece of bread and enjoy it straight out of the mill as new oil.