Pressing Olive Oil The Traditional Way

The fiscoli, with their layers of olive paste, are stacked in the press, in five-pad stacks separated by steel plates.

Loading the press takes 45 minutes to an hour, and by the time the press is half loaded the weight of the stack is already pressing oil from the lowermost disks.

And this brings up an important point: One of the things one often hears now from olive oil producers is how important it is to keep the oil from oxidizing. In fact, some modern presses are pressurized with nitrogen (an inert gas) to keep oxygen from reaching the olives as they are ground and the resultant paste is stirred. No oxidation, they say, makes for better oil.

However, Sandro Bosticco, an expert olive oil taster, tells me that the situation isn't quite that simple. While it's true that exposure to oxygen leads to deterioration, exposure to oxygen during the grinding and gramolatura phases appears to promote the development of the compounds that give olive oil its distinctive (and captivating) aromas.