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Report 1 (of 6): 100% Virgin Olive Oil
Introduction
Andalucia in southern Spain is the world's biggest
olive oil producing area. In the cultivated hills
of Baena, below the mountains of the Sierra Madre,
the Nunez de Prado family has produced extra-virgin
olive oil for seven generations. Unlike many of
their neighbouring producers, they do not target
the more commercial end of the olive oil market
but instead make one of Spain's premier condiment
extra-virgin olive oils.
Organic Olive Trees
Since 1795, the family had followed the traditional
methods of producing olive oil but by the 1980's
they decided that far too many chemicals were being
used and that the only way to increase the purity
of the oil was to grow organic olive trees. Other
producers are obsessed with keeping all insects
and weeds away from their olive trees even though
using pesticides means that chemical residues may
end up in the oil.
The Nunez de Prado family has developed a regime
that recycles everything - the weeds are cut to
form a mulch; the leftovers from harvesting and
the remains from oil pressing are all composted
and returned to the soil.
The Nunez de Prado family cultivate over 100,000
olive trees on four estates, totalling about 1,000
acres. They produce four hundred thousand kilogrammes
a year and no chemicals have been used for over
a decade. Instead the insects are tolerated and
the weeds are left to grow. It means that there
is no need to wash the olives once they have been
picked because no toxic pesticides are being used
and they are being picked directly from the tree.
Olive Trees
The olive tree is renowned for bearing heavy fruit
in alternate years and so most farmers planted two
shoots together to enable twin trunks to mature from
the same root mass. The Nunez de Prado's introduced
a new concept in the 1970's which was to use only
one shoot. The crown grows hardier and supports a
strong scaffold of main branches and also produces
more young olive-bearing wood. Careful pruning can
keep production relatively stable.
An olive tree starts producing fruit at ten or
twelve years. It is at its most productive between
twenty and forty years old. After fifty it slows
down. When a tree turns eighty, it declines a lot
and will be pulled down so a new tree can be planted.
The wood is sold for burning or making furniture.
Acidic Content of Extra Virgin Olive Oil
To qualify as extra-virgin, the oil must contain
less than 1% acidity. The Nunez de Prado family
produce cooking oil so pure that it is only 0.2%
acidic when usually olive oil is 0.5%. Although
such small variations do not affect the taste,
the low acidity suggests that the flavour compounds
have not been disturbed. Extra-virgin oil must
also pass a panel of tasters who grade its taste,
aroma and appearance.
The Harvesting of Olives
Planning strategically, the family only pick from
trees with olives that have just turned from deep
purple to black. The fruit is ripe and firm but
not yet soft. Plenty of pressable olives lie freshly
fallen under the trees but they are left on the
ground. In Spain where everyone else beats their
olive trees with sticks and cleans them within
minutes, the Nunez de Prado family employ hand
pickers to harvest the trees. If they work at lightning
speed, they can pick all the olives from a tree
in twenty minutes, dropping them into baskets hung
around their waists as they go. Hand picking protects
the olives from bruising, which triggers acidity,
and it also protects the trees.
The Processing of Olives
At the end of each morning's and afternoon's picking,
the olives are taken to the mill in trucks and
pressed immediately. The trucks dump the olives
into chutes in the lot outside and they go underground
into the crusher. Using one hundred year old presses,
the olives are crushed to pulp by 300 tonne granite
cones which are filed and chiselled for perfect
balance and surface, before each season of harvesting
starts.
The oily paste is then taken by conveyor belt
to a Thermofilter which consists of two giant stainless
steel rollers covered in a tight wire mesh, one
on top of the other, which lift and slowly turn
the paste. Oil drips from the crushed olives and
is strained through tiny holes - 50 per square
millimetre. It runs out through a trough at the
bottom to a separate decantation system. This is
called flor de aceite, the flower of oil and is
not pressed but simply runs out by itself due to
gravity. Normally, pressing yields a kilogramme
of oil for every five kilogrammes of olives but
eleven kilogrammes of olives are needed to make
one kilogramme of flor de aceite.
The remaining mash is spread carefully onto double
layered woven mats. An operator builds a tower
of 120 mats, placing each one on a central pillar
and separating them at intervals using metal disks
for stability. A hydraulic pump pushes up from
the bottom and oil runs down the tower into a spillway
to the decantation tubs. It takes nearly an hour
to compress the stack by two metres. After each
pressing has been completed the mats are cleaned
so that residue does not flavour the new oil.
The new oil, which is black, runs along the open
gutters and collects slowly in the decantation
room where there are a dozen interconnected basins
which purify the oil. In the first basin, most
of the vegetable water and impurities settle to
the bottom and the oil floating on the top is piped
to a second chamber. The waste water is drained
off and used as fertiliser for the trees. This
separation continues in the other basins for several
days until only pure oil, cloudy and golden, remains.
The Nunez de Prado's decided that filtering the
oil removed too much of the flavour which is why
the oil they produce is cloudy.
Bottling
The oil is taken from the final decantation chamber
for bottling.
Bottles on a table are filled and corked. A label
is tied on by a string that runs under a plastic
sleeve designed to prevent leakage. This is applied
with an old paint removing heat gun lashed to the
arm of a flexible lamp. Red sealing wax is melted
onto the cork and the seal of the Nunez de Prado's
is imprinted into it.
For further information, please contact:
Nunez de Prado,
Cervantes, 15,
14850 Baena,
SPAIN.
Tel: +957 67 01 41
Fax: +957 67 00 19
Intermediate Technology would like to thank
the Nunez de Prado family for providing the original
material on organic olive growing and the production
of olive oil.
Further reading available from ITDG Development Bookshop:
The Manual Screw Press for Small-scale Oil
Extraction
Kathryn H. Potts and Keith Machell
Manual oil extraction from peanuts or other soft oil-seeds can be a viable
enterprise for small businesses. This book describes small-scale processes
of oil-extraction for possible use in rural areas, as well as ways to market
and distribute the oilcake.
72pp. ISBN 1 85339 198 0 Paperback 1995 (ITP) £8.95
Small-scale Oil Extraction from Groundnuts
and Copra
ILO
Describes in detail various techniques that may be used, and the three main
stages of processing for the extraction of oil from groundnuts and copra.
108pp. ISBN 0 92210 3503 4 Paperback 1983 (ILO) £9.45
Small-scale Vegetable Oil Extraction
S.W.Head
ISBN 0 85954 387 0 Paperback (Natural Resources Institute) £15.00
To order any of these books from ITDG Development
Bookshop, send a Sterling Cheque (adding 15% for
postage and packing to European addresses, 25%
elsewhere), or credit card details (American Express,
Visa or MasterCard) to:
ITDG Development Bookshop
103-105 Southampton Row,
London WC1B 4HH,
United Kingdom.
Tel. +44 171 436 9761
Fax +44 171 436 2013
E-mail orders@itpubs.org.uk or visit
our website at http://www.developmentbookshop.com/
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