Cultural Anthropologist: Tidbits from Tuscany

After discovering that not all olive oil tastes good, I decided to do some research on the olives of Tuscany. Here's what I learned:

Olive trees are evergreen (who would've thunk?). It usually takes about four years before they begin to bear fruit, but the trees can live for hundreds of years. They are incredibly resilient, sprouting back easily even if chopped to the ground, and fire-resistant.
In most Mediterranean areas, olives are harvested in November, December and January, but in Tuscany the harvest can start as early as late September. This early harvest means that Tuscan olives are generally less ripe and therefore produce less oil than others. So Tuscan olive oil is also rarer than its olive oil peers.
In Tuscany, olives are always picked by hand and the entire family is usually called on to pitch in during the harvest. (Sounds fun, doesn't it?) Olives are picked while they are still green and must be rushed to the press as soon as they come off the tree so they don't spoil.
In their natural state, olives are very bitter, so they are soaked in brine before beingeaten or packaged for consumers. The potent little fruits are about 20 percent oil, so it takes about 200 of them to produce a liter of olive oil.

In Tuscany, olives are pressed at a communal mill called a Frantoio. Growers traditionally bring their olives to the mill and stay to observe the official pressing. Granite wheels are used to crush the olives whole -- skin, pits and all -- making a paste which is further filtered and processed to extract all liquid from the fruit. This involves running the liquid through woven mats placed in a hydraulic press. A centrifuge separates the watery olive mass from the oil, and the oil is then stored in large jugs or steel tanks to "age" for a least a month. It then undergoes one more filtration process before it isfinally sold to consumers.

Check out the following sites for more fun facts, travel tips and recipe ideas related to the Tuscan olive harvest:

Food Network - Michael Chiarello

Photo courtesies: siciliasud.it, Wikimedia commons

Cultural Anthropologist