Confessions of a food geek: Olive oil obsession and more. 6 June 2007 10:46 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,cheese,cooking,eating,fangirl,food snobbery,geekery,Harold McGee,identity,news,salad,taste test , trackbackSo in case it wasn’t obvious from, oh, this entire blogsite, I’m a bit of a food geek. My kitchen scale is the coolest new toy maybe since Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, I think Cook’s Illustrated is by far the best food magazine in the entire universe not just because it has no ads but even more so because their recipes read like lab reports (here’s what we wanted, here’s what went wrong, here’s what we learned and how we eventually fixed the problem), and until recently I was pretty sure that nothing could beat the culinary nerdiness of Cook’s TV show, America’s Test Kitchen. However, until just a few hours ago I had never seen a single episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown. Wow.
The episode was “Salad Daze,” from my friendly local public library’s copy of the DVD compilation Tossed Around, and in the “Ask Alton” bonus feature after the episode the host revealed that it was in fact one of the very first shows of the first season. And boy howdy, was it ever nerdy. Peter said it had him at “if the shoe fits, you must acquit,” but I’m more hard-pressed to pinpoint the source of the show’s appeal, perhaps because watching it also made me squirm. Still, fun stuff, even if I think I prefer the Cook’s Illustrated Caesar salad dressing recipe (Alton’s croutons win, though, as did his little mini-rant about the awesomeness of mortar and pestle over garlic presses, oh yes). One little quibble: in the “Ask Alton” section, there was a question about egg yolks, but the text on screen spelled it “egg yokes” and it didn’t even get a funny comment from Alton (see how I’m already thinking of him on a first-name basis, and not just because he looks eerily like my friend Mike?) Ackity ack ack! But whatever, I’m over it, really, I can (sometimes) control the anal-retentive English teacher who lives in my forebrain. To get on with the subject of olive oil mentioned in the title of this post, one thing I found particularly endearing about “Salad Daze” was a little blurb of text that referred to extra virgin olive oil as xv, in a font that looked like mathematical variables. Shiny!
My favorite olive oil, however, is not shiny but cloudy. It’s extra-virgin unfiltered olive oil from Oleificio G. Boeri in Italy, near my parents’ adopted neighborhood of Busana Vecchia (the website is in Italian, but that shouldn’t stop everybody reading this — yes, Penny, I’m looking at you). Mom and Dad brought me two 1-liter bottles of the stuff the last time they visited, and I have been hoarding it carefully ever since, only using it raw, in salad dressings and the like, because I don’t want to take any chances of destroying its beautiful flavor with heat. I realize this makes me sound like an obsessive mutant freak, but first of all, really, what else is new, and secondly and far more importantly, it is so worth it. (You also have my solemn promise that I will never go raw-foodist, don’t worry.) I get pretty good xv olive oil (oh, that notation is never getting old) for everyday cooking, in bulk or at least huge containers as I can find it, and that’s worth it, too (expeller pressed oils forever! mechanical extraction only! friends don’t let friends risk the chance of scary processing chemicals!) Still, the supermarket stuff won’t tempt me to take a big, slurpy sip.
Which brings me full circle back to another patron saint of food geekery mentioned in the very first paragraph of these ramblings: Harold McGee, whose most recent New York Times “The Curious Cook” food column is all about olive oil, and the sip-slurp of its taste testing. I kid you not. Go read that piece for some of the food geeking to which Alton Brown owes a major debt, and then tell me it didn’t make you curious about the oil you cook with. I know it did me, and so this afternoon while I was making marinated feta with sundried tomatoes and oregano and garlic (so awesome, by the way), I broke out a tablespoon and tasted each of my olive oils. First I tried the Star brand (a blend of extra-virgin oils from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Tunisia, packaged in Spain). Whoa! McGee wasn’t kidding when he said olive oils could be complex! The Star had a strange bitterness that I’d never noticed before, perhaps because I usually cook with it, and that taste gets overwhelmed by my other ingredients, or somehow destroyed by heat.
Then I had a drink of water to cleanse my palate, and poured myself a spoonful of G. Boeri, the oil that first made me realize what food writers are talking about when they use the word “fruity” about anything but wine or, well, fruit. That revelation took place a few weeks ago, and there may have been balsamic vinegar involved. Today, it was just me and the oil.
And it was wonderful. Smooth, well-balanced, mellow, flavorful — I could go on listing adjectives but none of them really do it justice. All I’m really trying to say is, “Damn, that stuff is gooood.” I might stop putting it in salad dressings and start using it as salad dressing all by itself, with maybe just a spritz of lemon juice and some salt. Yum.
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Liz
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http://www.allchiara.com Chiara
