rancid olive oil?

I bought one of those big tins of Philip Berio extra virgin olive oil a few weeks ago since I was running out of my current tin. Last night I went to make a vinaigrette and decided to see what a oil in a freshly opened tin tasted like (my old tin was over a year old by the time I finished it).

So I tried a very small spoonful of oil straight... And gagged so hard I almost lost my lunch in the kitchen sink! The oil was bitter to the point of reminding me of bile! Yet it smells fine - like olive oil with a faint whiff of fresh citrus, and I'm sure I've used it to sautee a few dishes in the last few days that didn't come out bitter

So am I crazy? Is the oil rancid or something else? (And will Valle Produce let me exchange it without a receipt?)

vegmojo

P.S. by "tin" I mean a plastic bladder enclosed in a metal container

Hi,

I once went to an olive oil tasting. The notes are buried somewhere in my files. I do recall it should smell like green apples.

I looked up Olive Oil Tasting, which may prove useful. I excerpted the common characteristics:

Common Olive Oil Characteristics and Their Descriptors

(A far more extensive listing (72) of olive oil descriptors can be found in a tasting wheel format Here )

Negative

Fusty Brined olives, lactic acid.
Musty Mouldy, mould spores, musty room.
Winey Vinegar and/or nail polish remover. Exactly the same as volatile acidity (VA) in wine.
Rancid Off walnuts, stale oil. The most common defect.
Muddy Sediment Stale muddy water, fetid, off stale milk, baby vomit.
Metallic Metal on tooth fillings (light sensation of), epsom salts.
Earthy Earth, wet soil.
Burnt Caramel.
WoodyTwiggy.

Positive

Fruity Grassy, spinach, artichoke, green banana, leafy, tomato leaf, bean sprout, green tomato, herbaceous, hay, nutty, almond, pine nut, orange, lemon, floral, spicy, apple, eucalyptus, perfumed, confectionery, buttery. (These are only a sample of all the different characters seen in olive oil)

Bitter grapefruit rind, tonic water.
Pungent pepper heat, chilli heat, throat catching.

Rancid oil is just nasty!

Regards,

Cathy,

Thanks for the wheel chart link.

I should just going to return it, but I know curiousity will get the best of me and I'll -gulp- taste it again to characterize what is nasty about it w.r.t. to that tasting chart.

Now I assume leaving that oil in my car's trunk all day (I can't get to the store until after work) would be foolish on a day like today (in the explosive kind of way)

vegmojo

vegmojo wrote:Now I assume leaving that oil in my car's trunk all day (I can't get to the store until after work) would be foolish on a day like today (in the explosive kind of way)

Actually, I'd be very surprised if the oil expanded enough at 100 degrees to cause an explosion of any kind... Obviously those temperatures aren't ideal storage for olive oil, but I don't think there's any safety concern

Bitterness is probably a characteristic of the olives used, their stage of ripeness when pressed and the kind of equipment used to do the pressing.

Rancid oil doesn't become bitter. It has a musty, moldy or spoiled taste.

Perhaps this year's oil is more bitter than last year's?

HI,

When I went to this olive oil tasting I knew less about olive oil than I realized. We had several oils to taste, one being a blend, the rest were first pressings. The first pressings all had strong tastes and odors intended for salads and finishing by drizzling, which I initially considered unpleasant. The least assertive tasting was my initial preference, which was the blended oil meant for cooking rather than salads.

Of course the conductor of the tasting was a purist. He felt our ability to taste and smell was compromised if we took a shower, washed our hair, brushed our teeth or used deodorant. I was naturally guilty on all counts. The final offense was perfume, well there I had a clean slate!

Now I understand olive oil better and consequently own a few more bottles of olive oil concurrently than I used to.

My best olive oil is refrigerated until needed (I leave it by the stove to warm up enough to pour). My blended cooking oil in the gallon container is stored at room temperature.

Regards,

Cathy,

Do you have a favorite olive oil and can you say why? Where was the tasting and are any more scheduled? Did it concentrate on a specific country or did it cover Italy, Spain & Greece? Do you have a favorite country you like your olive oil from?

Also, being fairly new to this forum, I get the impression you work in the food industry somehow from all the interesting posts you make. Would you mind sharing your background for those of us that don't know everyone's history?

Actually, I get the impression several people here are well connected to the food industry besides just being food enthusiasts (which is what I consider myself to be, some of my realatives have close ties to the restaurant industry, but I personally am not closely tied)... would love to hear people's associations with the industry. I'm sure this has been acknowledged before, but it makes reading the posts more interesting knowing a person's background.

Thanks!

Christine

I've consumed olive oil almost every day of my life and that spans a rather long period of time now. At any given moment, there are some four or five bottles of olive oil in my kitchen, each with its own set of uses (this is not rocket science but rather, for the most part, the expression of the belief that if you want to make a dish that was developed in some given place, it makes sense to use as much as possible ingredients from that given place).

I must say that I've never had an experience with olive oil such as you describe here. Rancidness, as suggested above, should not result in a massive increase in bitterness and there is presumably something else going on; indeed, bitterness is most associated with young olives and young oil and bitterness tends to diminish a bit with time.

The oil in question, Filippo Berio, is one of the very large producers in Italy (along with, for example, Carapelli and Bertolli) that is to my mind quite serviceable but not especially interesting. These oils are all pan-Mediterranean blends; that is, they buy decent oil from wherever they can (especially Spain and North Africa, also Turkey, etc.) at a decent price and blend it together and hope you will not read the fine print on the bottle (or can) and just notice that they are Italian-based or more specifically Tuscan-based. I use Berio and Bertolli only of the regular grade, i.e. "olive oil", not extra-virgin and not light and flavoured, just plain olive oil. That's one of my basic oils (along with peanut) for large-scale frying or deep-frying. Extra virgin olive oil has a far more pronounced flavour and is expensive and thus less suited to those uses.

I assume that you've used Berio extra-virgin oil before and have liked it. If it is, however, the case that you haven't used that brand or don't habitually use extra-virgin oil, then perhaps your reaction is just to the more pronounced flavour of Berio (and that particular batch may have included some oil or oils that were more bitter than most). In general, if you want mild flavoured oil, those large-scale Italian producers fit the bill well. More expensive, more subtle are generally Provençal and northern Italian (that is, for the most part Ligurian) oils. I've also found that some of the Middle Eastern oils can be remarkably mild in flavour (read: bland) but there are various problems involved in finding good Lebanese or Tunisian oils; I like them a lot when they're good (read: neither just bad nor bland) and once in a while I find one that is quite good.

For my day-in day-out cooking I use primarily olive oils from central and southern Italy, and there especially southern Lazio (the ancestral zone) and Sicily, and also Greece; I've gone on record elsewhere on the board as being a big fan of olive oil from Crete but there are some from the Peloponnese and elsewhere in Greece that I like very much. Of late I've also been purchasing regularly an oil from Spain -- Andalucía, to be more precise -- which is both fairly cheap and quite good for lots of basic applications.

All in all, one must simply try a lot of oils and figure out what ones and, more generally, what kinds of oils one prefers. It is clearly true that most people in this country prefer relatively mild-flavoured oils (hence all the "light" versions one sees springing up, which have only less flavour, not fewer calories). I love olive oil and enjoy very much a wide range of styles and flavour profiles (bitter, spicy, fruity, etc.).* And only for deep-frying for large-scale pan frying do I use a blander (though the crucial factor is generally more the cost ), non-extra-virgin oil.

In general, if you don't like at all a bitter element in your olive oil, the large producers of blends are the way to go for basic oils. Beyond that, bitterness varies with the age of the olives from which the oil is made, the age of the oil itself (a 'new' oil will mellow a little before it ultimately goes rancid) but also with the type of olive and where precisely the olives are grown.

Antonius

* In Italian, one speaks of oils being 'fruttato verde' and 'fruttato dolce' with the former having piquant, bitter and astringent elements, along with the fruity flavour(s) of the olives; 'dolce' or 'sweet' oils aren't, of course, actually sweet but rather just not piquant or astringent and lack a bitter element. Both kinds have their uses and I'm personally fond of oils with the 'green' characteristics.

vegmojo wrote:I bought one of those big tins of Philip Berio extra virgin olive oil a few weeks ago since I was running out of my current tin. Last night I went to make a vinaigrette and decided to see what a oil in a freshly opened tin tasted like (my old tin was over a year old by the time I finished it).

Vegmojo:

As a post script to the above I would suggest that you perhaps not buy the large cans, at least not if they last more than a year. Buy smaller quantities -- I like 500 ml bottles -- and, while I know I go through such quantities of olive oil that even a large can would never have a chance to go rancid in our house, I don't want to commit to such a large quantity of one oil and don't want to take any chance of being stuck with an individual can of oil that doesn't a) suit my taste or b) might hang around open for more than a couple of months.

Smaller quantities, stored on your counter, is I think a better way to go, especially if you don't use a can up in less than a few months. Smaller quantities also allows for more sampling. And while buying the large quantity of a can potentially saves a good bit of money, I find that advantage outweighed by the commitment to a large quantity and the fact that that large quantity will likely lose some of its 'green' characteristics before I finish it. Bottles of 500 ml can be had at Greek and Arab and (some) Italian specialty shops at sometimes surprisingly good prices, if one if willing to travel and hunt. Grocery chains definitely overcharge wildly on their oil.

Sorry if some of what I wrote above was mixing responses to Christine with responses to you -- I got wrapped up in the response and lost track of how the whole thread had developed.

Antonius

Thanks for all the help and insight!

I'm wondering if my palate was dulled by my last EVOO tin as it became less and less flavorful as time went on, and a new, fresh batch was shocking when tasted plain. More research (yikes) is necessary I guess.

Antonius, you're right - I shouldn't buy the big tins of oil. I cook somewhat often, 4 or 5 meals a week, but as a single guy usually cooking for 1 or 2 people, everything in the grocery store comes in too big a container, and I've learned to live with it.

10 pounds of potatoes? Won't finish them but it's more economic than the loose potatoes, even factoring in what I throw away. Same with whole stalks of celery, heads of lettuce, bags of onions, loafs of bread, 12 packs of tortillas, dozens of eggs. It's frustrating, always tossing out spoiled food. And here - I bought the 101 oz. jug-o-EVOO for 12.99. A 17oz bottle of the same brand is $4.99 I believe. The numbers are hard to ignore.

I hate to be waste food, but I hate to waste my money even more...

On the flip side, with a smaller amount of oil, I would just chalk it up to a bad bottle and move on

vegmojo