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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

>We were curious about what we'd find in a U.S. supermarket. So we shipped three brands of Italian extra virgin we purchased in New York back to the mother country.

>They were included in a blind taste test by those experts in Rome. The process is as tightly orchestrated as a Verdi opera. Blue glass hides the oil's color. Separate cubicles prevent cheating.

>The panel would not say they were adulterated - but they agreed two brands we purchased back home did not come within a sniff of extra virgin. They described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand happens to be one of the best-selling in America.

Fascinating. I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil. Odds are that the extra virgin olive oil from a supermarket is just some other oil with some chlorophyll added for coloring.

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I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil.

Buy Greek extra virgin. Guaranteed flavor and quality. Italians buy it to raise the quality of theirs. In Greece 80% of virgin oil production is extra virgin. In Italy it's less than 50%, while in Spain less than 20%.

Here's one for example: http://www.amazon.com/Iliada-Extra-Virgin-Olive-Liter/dp/B00...

Highly recommended. I have been buying this olive oil for 1+ year now, and it is up there with the best I have ever had (and I travel to Mediterranean countries often). Every time I have guests for a dinner party, oil/bread is usually served as an appetizer, and most guests immediately notice the quality.

And no, I did NOT receive this product at a discount in return for an unbiased review :-)

> In Greece 80% of virgin oil production is extra virgin. In Italy it's less than 50%, while in Spain less than 20%.

Just a note: After wikipedia in 2013, world production of virgin olive oil was 2.8 million tonnes. Spain produced 1.1 million tonnes, or 39% of world production in this year whereas in Greece the production of virgin olive oil was only 0.31 million tonnes. Therefore, please note that with your data both countries will produce almost the same amount of liters of extra virgin in fact.

If you find that in Spain less than 20% of the virgin olive oil is extra, this is a good thing, not bad. Means that if you read "extra virgin" in the tag is top quality. Only the best of the best can be tagged as extra virgin (More than 80% of the candidates are eliminated in the process). Of course, the controlled and 'low' production is also a marketing strategy to keeping prices of this premium product always high. Spain could produce much more bottles of extra virgin if they wanted to do so.

After wikipedia: Extra-virgin olive oil accounts normally for less than 10% of oil produced (extra-virgin + virgin + refined + pomace) so to find extra-virgin produced in California should be currently difficult, but the percentage is 80% in Greece, 65% in Italy and 50% in Spain and is not difficult to find in the european markets. Is just that is not cheap.

After tasting homemade olive oil from some Croatian island, I understood the term of extra virgin. The taste is incredible rich and pinches your tongue.

A litre will cost you 12-15 Euros, but it really worths the price. In a supermarket you will ( almost ) never be able to buy that kind of quality. Mostly due to the fact that a large number of people do not know the real taste and will qualify the real extra virgin as "bad" and thus will not sell and secondly why not sell something low quality that is traditionally expensive (10+ euros /L ) with a big margin?

My boss is American. When he moved to Italy for a couple month to check the progress, he spent first week eating tomatoes raw out of the supermarket at every chance. Then discovered what burrata is.

Ciao, my fellow Italian :) I know the feeling. I've seen this countless times, with raw tomatoes, raw lemons (!!!!), and a few other things.

But they are so good! We lived in Sardinia for a few months and would buy tomatoes by the several kilo every week. The seller often commented about the number of guests we must have had (none!). We always ate them with fresh bread, cheese and of course local olive oil (by the liter). Era veramente delizioso!

Kirkland extra virgin olive oil is the real deal. The one in the glass bottle, anyways. I can't speak for the plastic one.

Can Costco do no wrong?

How do you know?

I shop at Whole Foods which isn't cheap. The one thing I got from watching this video is.

I have NEVER had extra virgin olive oil that looked like that or tasted any and had that reaction. Have I been really using fake olive oil all this time?

Yep.

Just wait until you taste the real stuff. You can buy it on amazon. It's very much worth the price.

If you're not an expert, how do you know what's on Amazon is the real thing though?

Also, related reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zcpt4/til_u...

My advice is to buy Californian olive oil -- it's becoming more expensive as people realize most European EVOO is adulterated, but it's still often cheaper and usually better than European imports.

Good olive oils are a little bitter, very grassy and quite distinct; the less flavor they have the more likely they've been diluted with cheap oils, while the taste of table olives is a mark of rancidity.

Also, if you haven't had true aged balsamic, get a small bottle sometime and try it on berries or good bread. The stuff you buy in the store is like petroleum waste in comparison.

I agree with what you've said here about taste. However, I would add that the use of extra virgin olive oil is so heavy handed with TV/marketing that people don't realize just how much specific flavor it has - and that it's not an all purpose cooking oil as much as Rachael Ray wants it to be.

I actually struggle to find light olive oil in stores, which used to be more of a standard I used for light sauteing, etc. I wonder how much of the dilution is based on the over strong demand for the stuff. and lack of definition of "extra virgin" by the US market? The article mentions it must be from the first press of olives, is this a labeling law in the US?

If the olive oil is marked as "U.S. Extra Virgin" or "U.S. Virgin," then USDA is randomly sampling the product to determine conformance. However, if the product is just marked as "Extra Virgin," then it hasn't sought USDA certification. Not all U.S. oils are neccessarily USDA certified, either.

I use California virgin oils for sautéing, which has worked out pretty well. As you say, the better Californians and European EVOOs are best left as table oils.

Thanks.. I'll give that a try.

If Berkeley isn't too far, try Amphora Nueva as a source. Once you taste test a few high-quality olive oils the difference is immediately apparent.

Around 2006, we started buying Bariani EV olive oil (from California) in our household, for all food applications in which it is desirable to taste the oil. Back then, you couldn't even buy it direct from them, so you had to get it through MadeInCalifornia.net .

In a blind (but not double-blind) taste test between it and supermarket-bought "extra virgin" Italian "olive" oil (supposedly adulterated with hazelnut oil), there was absolutely no contest. The difference was glaringly obvious. You could detect the difference just from the odor wafting through the air as I put the spoons down on the plate.

Similar experience with Balsamic vinegar. The supermarket imitation balsamic vinegar, compared to multiple-barrel-aged balsamic-style vinegar, or even the genuine Balsamic vinegar from Modena, is very different. Same deal for regular feed-trough butter vs. pasture-fed butter. The "real" thing, whatever it is, is usually 2x-4x as expensive as the industrial-scale stuff, though. So it's usually worthwhile to get both, and save the expensive stuff for when quality matters most.

It's very hard to do a fair blind taste test when the testers know without a doubt which sample is which, even when actually blindfolded--makes it impossible to remove prejudicial biases such as "more expensive equals tastes better" or "traditional process equals tastes better" or "nostalgic appeal equals tastes better".

What are you saying that industrial dairy feeds? I'm under the impression that they feed corn, but also lots of hay (a relative leases some land to a small to medium sized dairy operation, the dairy planted hay there). The biggest difference between hay and pasture is that the hay is easier to truck in.

Right, but hay isn't fresh grass from the field.

Grass fed beef has a distinctly gamey-er taste than corn fed, I've found. At least if the grass fed beef I've bought is actually grass fed.

Furthermore, pastures contain plants other than grasses that cows enjoy eating, which have different nutritional qualities than straight grass hay, alfalfa hay, or silage. There is a practice (MIRG) of rotating ruminant herds through different pastures on a schedule that allows plants in the pasture to reach maturity before being eaten, and this supposedly also has an effect on what plants the herd actually eats. I can't remember if the article that I read about it said that it makes them more picky or less picky, though.

On a historic note, early American farmers planted pumpkins for their cows to eat, which made the butter darker, from all the carotene. A lot of herds still get the leftover trash from pumpkin farms after Halloween.

> Fascinating. I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil. Odds are that the extra virgin olive oil from a supermarket is just some other oil with some chlorophyll added for coloring.

It isn't hard. Just generally, its around $40 a bottle.

Most people buy stuff with similar labels at $7-10 a bottle and think its the same because it claims to be EVOO as well.

There is no import regulation on the term 'extra virgin'. Its just a marketing term in America. Often what you buy is mostly corn oil.

This is a good point. Introducing controls/trademarks like what can be called champagne, foie gras or roquefort could help users to select real product.

Or hazelnut oil.

It's quite telling that the amount of "extra virgin" "Italian" "olive" oil exported from Italy is not only greater than the amount of actual virgin oil that its olive orchards could theoretically produce, but also greater than the amount of olive oil Italy actually produces, for all grades. It is either cut with a different oil, or it is imported from elsewhere (Greece, Spain) and re-exported.

"They described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand happens to be one of the best-selling in America."

That quote seems a little self-fulfilling. If you asked a butcher to eat 3 hamburgers, one from Ruby Tuesdays, one from McDonalds and one from In-n-out. Do it a blind taste test just small samples of the meet. Would you be shocked to learn that the cheapest and worst tasting was also the best-selling in the United States?

Is that one the cheapest?

Just the hamburger by itself (with bun) is $0.89. It's definitely the cheapest of the three I listed.

I meant the low-quality olive oil they panned.

In theory (maybe not true) the lowest quality one should have the lowest price point. In a sample of 3 it seems fairly likely.

Known Turkish brands are quite safe too.

It's like how americans call mozzarella any soft white cheese that isn't brie and cheddar is anything yellow and firm.

I have never encountered this. I wouldn't argue the Americans are particularly interested in the specifics of cheese culture (pun intended), but the level of ignorance you're suggesting is hyperbolic.

It amuses me (and somewhat frustrates me, as an American) how Americans are the last acceptable target for national stereotypes.

The problem is that America is so diverse that national stereotyping is hard. It is more akin to saying all Europeans.

That doesn't stop people from saying Americans don't know geography, or don't speak more than one language, or think a $10 hamburger is the height of cuisine. Stereotypes don't have to match reality.

Depends - in Europe every stereotype is free game. Of course we tend to treat hurt feelings with polite amusement. So you are able to hear all kinds of fun and offensive stuff here.

In this case the statement is in-line with labeling laws; as in you legally are not lying if you sell cheese labeled in this manner.

The requirements for labeling "mozarella" and "cheddar" look fairly precise to me (noting that I am not very knowledgeable about cheese, just more knowledgeable than the presented stereotype) based on the regulations I found here:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...

Californians, Wisconsinites, and New Yorkers are somewhat more knowledgeable regarding cheeses than, for instance, Floridians.

Nevertheless, you can still sell individually wrapped American "pasteurized processed cheese food" slices in all states, even those with well-developed dairy herds. As far as I know, those things are produced with petroleum distillates and plasticizer chemicals. It's sort of sad that the stuff colloquially known as "American cheese" is not even allowed to be marketed as cheese according to the U.S. government definition of cheese.

It may surprise you to know that some Americans actually do know the difference between mozzarella made from buffalo (not bison) milk, mozzarella made from whole cow milk, and mozzarella made from part-skim cow milk. We just can't afford the premium to buy the good stuff, so supermarkets don't carry very much whole cow milk cheese, and never the imported buffalo milk stuff.

It's not that we can't tell the difference between Colby, Cheshire, Gloucester, mild Cheddar, and extra-sharp Cheddar. We just usually don't care enough to pay more for one in preference to another.

As far as I know, those things are produced with petroleum distillates and plasticizer chemicals.

The key addition is an emulsifier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_cheese#Advantages

(cue tptacek raving about sodium citrate)

I guess such things might be derived from petroleum, but in that case it would be highly purified and identifiable by a single chemical name (so no need to give it a more general label like petroleum distillates).

The emulsifier does enable the addition of other milk byproducts and oil and such, but there's no reason to suggest that the bulk of the material in processed cheese is anything other than milk products.

For the record, that was hyperbole, extrapolated from my opinion that the stuff tastes like plastic, and my other opinion that it is so far removed in taste and texture from any of the cheeses I like that it might as well not contain any cheese in the first place.

SODIUM CITRATE IS SO AWESOME. It's so easy to get and ridiculously easy to use, unlike a lot of other modernist techniques. It's crazy to me that you can't buy packaged sliced melting blue cheese in stores by now.

Buffalo is the nickname for the American bison. Are you talking about milk from African buffalo which are different from bison?

Bufalo in this context mean domestic asian water buffalo.

More specifically, the Italian breed of water buffalo Bubalus bubalis italiano.

I always refer to American bison (Bison bison) as bison rather than buffalo, and rarely refer to African buffalo or Asian water buffalo at all.

It is unlikely that anyone would make cheeses from bison milk, as their udders are quite small, and you are likely to get kicked in the head or gored before getting your bucket close enough. Bison herds are very defensive towards their nursing calves, especially with wolves, bears, or humans around.

The African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) will not just kick your ass. They will kill you, even if you don't show up with a milking bucket. Their herds will engage in revenge killings against lions, and are considered one of the most dangerous animals on the continent, killing (as a species) hundreds of humans every year.

So by elimination, that leaves the domesticated water buffalo as the only "buffalo" that you could safely milk to make cheese.

Just because you haven't encountered it doesn't mean it is not true. Most "cheddar" at your average US supermarket isn't even cheddared (but undergoes a washed-curd process instead, and optionally addition of annato to re-add colour and "flavor").

Keep in mind, we're talking about generalizations; my experience doesn't serve as definitive proof against a wide and lazy generalization of Americans and their cheese knowledge.

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