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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Practical Advice on Making the Best of Olive Oil, July 14, 2004
This book, `The Flavors of Olive Oil' by professional writer Deborah Krasner may be the answer to your prayers as you browse the fifty or more different labels of olive oil on the shelves of even a modest local market, let alone the bounty available at a megamart or a super gourmet store such as Zabar's or Balducci's in New York City. These riches cannot begin to be approached by a three-page article in `Cooks Illustrated' or `Consumer Reports'. And, even this book doesn't tell the whole story, as most of the economic, historical, and geopolitics of olive oil are left to other writers. This book truly concentrates only on Flavor, nutrition, and cooking with olive oil. A perfect companion to this book is Mort Rosenbloom's book `Olives' which has not a single recipe, but lots of poop on the ways of the European Union, politics, olive growing locations and people, history, and economics. You simply cannot get the full picture without reading both.But getting back to Ms. Krasner's `A Tasting Guide and Cookbook', the very, very best chapter is the second on techniques for tasting olive oil. This falls under the category of teaching you how to fish rather than giving you a fish. As preparing for a group tasting can be a bit pricy, it is one of the very best excuses I have ever found for gathering together a group of like-minded people to a common cause. (You find ways of socializing in some of the strangest places). In the absence of a handy group to help share opinions and defray the costs of buying ten or twelve bottles of olive oil, the author offers an 18 page guide to commercially available olive oils and her own olive oil karass' opinions on them (for the explanation of the obscure term karass, see Kurt Vonnegut's novel, `Cat's Cradle'). The depressing thing about this long list of olive oil tastings is that it doesn't even cover some of the brands on my megamart's shelves. But, it covers the most important ones, for sure. I was especially pleased to find the author and her tasters giving a very good opinion of at least one nationally available brand, Colavita, which is a doubly good value as it is available in metal cans in fairly small quantities. Other big Italian supermarket brands such as Berio (also very good) and Bertolli (not quite as distinctive a taste as the other two) come in cans of only a gallon or more. And, as the book so carefully states, protecting extra virgin olive oil from heat and light will prolong it's shelf life. As I was already quite familiar with the differences between `extra virgin olive oil', `virgin olive oil', `olive oil', and `light olive oil' before reading this book, this was no great illumination. What was illuminating was the great variety of tastes in olive oil from region to region, and how delicate those tastes are. For those of you who always skip to the back of the book, Tuscan extra virgin olive oil has the most distinctive taste, followed by oils from Apulia (Italy), Greece, and Provence (France). It was also illuminating to read how ephemeral the sharp tastes were. A year old oil, kept under the very best conditions, will simply not taste as fresh and bright and distinctive as an oil bottled and tasted in January, a month or two after most olives are harvested. One of the most important economic lessons one can get from this book is the fact that you are wasting money if you use an expensive olive oil to sautee, pan fry, or deep fry, as heat kills most, if not all of the distinctive flavors of the extra virgin oil. The whole point to producing extra virgin oil is to do it without any application of heat and without any technique which creates heat. If you are an avid follower of Mario Batali and believe that even deep frying should be done in extra virgin olive oil, be aware that there are several very good brands of extra virgin which will not fracture your pocket book. After all, if you are intent on following Mario to pure southern Italian goodness, then you may expect to have to pay for it. (Mario's point is that Italians used EVOO because that was all they had. The techniques for squeezing the second and third pressings from the olives simply did not exist until the 19th century). If you did not already know of olive oil's health benefits, this book will also fill you in on this score. Olive oil benefits by being a mono-unsaturated lipid that, by itself, is better than saturated animal fats such as butter and lard, and also better than poly-unsaturated fats such as canola and safflower oils. Olive oil adds value by containing vitamins, anti-oxidants, and other good stuff that only a chemist can pronounce. The down side is, I suspect, that this goodness degrades with time, enhancing the importance of getting the fresh stuff. The book contains an excellent list of internet sources, which, surprisingly, leaves out two of my favorites, Zingermans in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which does a national mail order business and DePalo in Little Italy, Manhatten, NY, NY. I cite this store because it is one place where I am sure you can go in and request a taste of olive oil samples and you will receive them with a smile. They also make primo fresh ricotta and mozzarella. The recipes are useful and comprise the lion's share of pages in the book, but the real gold comes before you get to the recipes. Highly recommended if you dote on Mediterranean food, or even if you just dote on good food and health.
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