Extra-Virgin: Choosing & Using

More on nature's finest ingredient

The olive oil shelves in my local supermarket show a dismaying number of bottles of extra-virgin, most of them, in my opinion, not worth bothering with. Just because it says extra-virgin is no guarantee that it’s any good.

So where should a cautious consumer go to be sure of finding a good oil? Not even an exceptional oil, just a good oil. How can a consumer confront that display in the oil department? I gave you short shrift last week in not devoting more time to the problem of how to choose an extra-virgin and be somewhat certain of the wisdom of your choice.

Read the Label

First of all, remember that olive oil, unlike wine, does not improve with age. Fresher is better. With that in mind, read the label on the bottle. (You do that anyway, don’t you? Read the labels for every processed food? And yes, olive oil is a processed food even if the process is minimal.) The finest oil will proudly display the date when it was harvested, even though this single most important piece of information, mysteriously, is not required. What you will see instead is a “use by” date and that can be deceptive. The use-by date is two years from the date of bottling, not from the date of harvest. Since an oil might be kept securely stored in an air-tight stainless-steel container for several months after harvest, it might be bottled, say, 18 months later and only then does the use-by date come into play. So, a use-by date of 2/24 could mean the oil was harvested in 2022, or 2021, or even in 2020, and by February 2024 it will be almost four years old.

What can a consumer do? Not much, alas, except be very aware. Caveat emptor, as we used to say back in the old country.

Other things to be aware of: High-end oils are expensive—it costs a lot to produce quality—and there are no bargains. Cheap oils should be avoided, but equally, just because an oil comes at a fancy cost is no guarantee that it will live up to its price tag. So price is not a reliable indication.

Other things to steer clear of: oil in clear glass bottles, which expose the oil to damaging light; oil, no matter how conscientiously packaged, that has been displayed in a sunny shop window or on a high shelf under bright shop lights (even an opaque tin won’t protect oil from the heat generated by those lights).

Read the Label Again!

Back to the label: European law requires producers to state both the origin of the olives and the place where they were processed; when oils from various origins have been blended by the producer, that too must be stated on the label. Place of origin is no guarantee of quality, but at least if the label suggests the oil was made in Italy by Old World crofters (peasant women in traditional garb cavorting happily in the olive trees) and the print states that it actually comes from many Mediterranean sources, you will know better than to pay an elevated price for the stuff. More than the date of harvest, look for information about the oil itself. If the label states “estate grown and bottled,” if it mentions the cultivars used in the oil (whether single varietal or a mixture), if it has other pertinent information, you can be pretty sure that it’s going to be worthwhile.

But in the end, the only guarantee you will have is your own palate. So my best advice is to taste and taste and taste—whenever you’re offered the opportunity, in a restaurant, in a fancy products store, at a food fair.

There’s another, easier way to solve the problem: Rely on an on-line source. There are several that I trust, based on my own experience. There may be more but these are four in which I have great confidence. The first two deal with olive oils from all over the world, including California. The remaining two deal exclusively with a range of fine Italian oils:

• ·      www.Zingermans.com

• ·      www.markethallfoods.com

• ·      www.gustiamo.com

• ·      www.olio2go.com

Cucina Povera? Cucina Magra? Cucina della Nonna? Cucina Contadina?

Just like that, or so it seems, cucina povera has become one of those catch phrases (is meme the right word?) that’s on every food person’s lips.

But what exactly does it mean?

Literally, it means poor cuisine or the cuisine of the poor but I would be hard put to find genuinely poor people in Italy who eat the dishes that are usually brought out as examples. I prefer to call it cucina magra, which my online dictionary translates, unhappily, as “lean cuisine.” Well, forget those boxes of calorie-calibrated frozen dinners, cucina magra really means a cuisine that sticks very close to what’s available and doesn’t go in for fancy assemblages of expensive ingredients. The truth of the matter is that cucina povera, cucina magra, cucina contadina (peasant cooking), cucina della nonna (granny’s cooking), whatever you call it is cooking that makes great food out of simple, home-grown, home-preserved, home-made ingredients, be that the pomarola made from September tomatoes, the wine made from October grapes, the oil made from November olives, the hams and sausages, pancetta and lardo and capocollo made from December’s pigs, and so on.

It's a rural kind of cooking, although you might also find a kind of cucina povera in some of Rome’s most celebrated trattorias.

Ohh, trying to define food in Italy for non-Italians is an exercise in frustration because for every example there is a counter, another cook who claims only this dish is genuine and everything else is a gussied-up fake.

Take ribollita, for example: The illustrious Tuscan stew of beans, greens, and bread is almost always cited as an example of cucina povera. On a website called “Trips2italy.com” (which I cannot recommend) it is described as a “soup. . . made with huge slices of meat, carrots, thyme, celery, and cabbage.”

This is almost outrageously wrong. I don’t usually take to task the myriad mistakes on the internet but in this case, describing a Tuscan icon as made with “huge slices of meat” is missing the whole point of cucina povera. What the term really means is a cuisine that sticks very close to what’s available—and what’s available in the Tuscan larder as the weather turns chilly is this: dried beans, root vegetables, onions and garlic, that pomarola, olive oil, and, critical to the

outcome, cavolo nero, aka Tuscan kale or lacinato kale, a dark-blue-green and delicious form of kale with arching, handsomely blistered leaves.

Without cavolo nero, my neighbors say, it just isn’t ribollita, though it might be a good bean soup. And without a lashing of fresh newly pressed oil dribbled over the top, it wouldn’t even be a good bean soup—just zuppa di fagioli comunque (a whatever soup).

But count on those beans, that cavolo nero, and above all that olive oil.

Because that’s what they had—olive oil, wheat from the fields ground into flour, eggs for the pasta, cornmeal for polenta, vegetables (beans and greens) from the garden, tomatoes preserved as a sauce, and with all this you could happily feed a family.

When times were good.

And when times were not so good you might add some chestnuts, wild mushrooms, greens from the forest, and still make something of a meal.

Pasta con Verdure Saltate

This is the kind of dish that can be a main course for a simple meal, or a primo, a first course, before something more complex, a piece of meat, chicken, or fish, for instance. However you serve it, it’s a fine example of the richness of cucina povera, of the ways Italian cooks use vegetables to exalt their flavors, of how olive oil works in the kitchen, and of how simple, inexpensive, seasonal ingredients can come together in something splendid and delicious.

No recipe is required. You simply take a couple of bunches of seasonal greens, in this case broccoli rabe, aka rapini, a spicy kind of broccoli that’s widely available in both supermarkets and farmers markets at this time of year. Rinse the greens and cut away any very tough ends, then toss them in a big pot of rapidly boiling, generously salted water. Let them cook for just about 4 or 5 minutes, until they’re softening, then extract the greens with a slotted spoon or ladle, leaving the greenish water behind. Set the greens on a chopping board and when cool enough to handle, chop them coarsely.

Add a little more boiling water to the pot of cooking water and bring it back to a boil. Toss in the pasta—a short, stubby pasta works much better than long, skinny shapes. I used just 250 grams of Rustichella d’Abruzzo’s strozzapreti (priest-stranglers!) when I made this for just two people. Now, while the pasta is cooking, add at least ¼ cup of extra-virgin to a skillet large enough to hold all the pasta with the greens. As soon as the oil is shimmering, throw in a clove or two of finely chopped garlic and as much crushed red chili pepper as you think you can tolerate. Once the garlic is releasing its aroma, stir in the chopped broccoli and turn and turn and turn it in the hot oil so it cooks down almost to a cream. This is called, in Italian cookbooks, broccoli ripassiti, and it’s a useful technique for all kinds of vegetables, but especially for greens.

When the pasta is almost, but not quite, done, again use a slotted ladle to extract the pasta and toss it right into the pan with the broccoli, adding a ladle or two of pasta water. Stir it all together and let the pasta finish cooking, absorbing all the flavorful liquid, in the garlicky broccoli sauce.

Then serve it up. And be sure to add a healthy dollop of fresh oil to top each serving. Grated cheese? I don’t think so. It would go against my cucina povera credentials to add such a rich ingredient. This is lean cuisine at its finest.