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Comment by riquito | Hacker News Reader

Nobody that I know buys 5-liter tins of oil (I'm italian) and I wouldn't even know where to buy them. The most common format is 1 liter, followed by 0.75

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Apparently I have bad memory, because 3-L is what I was thinking of, not 5-L. I'm not Italian myself, but my Italian landlord brings these kinds of things (not the same brand, but same format) regularly: http://www.colavita.com/store/images/products/EV_Oils/Med-Ti...

Most households in Greece will have something like that, and they're easy to find in any country if you go to a Turkish, Greek, or Arab supermarket. I could be wrong about Italy.

Don't confuse olive oil for cooking (commonly purchased in 3 liter tins) with extra virgin olive oil. This article is about extra virgin olive oil. EVOO is usually consumed raw, unheated, with bread, cheese, on salads - it would completely defeat the purpose of the EVOO production technique which is one of low temperture, purely mechanical extraction, to heat EVOO to high temperatures as is commonly done with lower grades of olive oil.

Just checked my 3-L tins to be sure, and they're extra-virgin also. The problem with the lower grades is that they're extracted with chemical means (hexane solvents) and generally worse for any usage. The modest price savings isn't really worth it, since better stuff is affordably priced anyway.

It varies by country, but heating doesn't necessarily exclude an oil from "extra-virgin olive oil"; the separate "cold-pressed" label covers that.

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