Olio d'Oliva

The storefront of the offices of Don Corleone's Genco Pura Olive Oil company.

If you cook Italian, eat Italian, or are Italian, the olive (oliva in Italian) is a big deal. Especially when it's pressed into oil. The olive tree has been around a long freakin' time. Like six thousand years! It started out as a shrub, a bush, but turned into a tree after people started messing around with it.  You know, cultivating it. Even the Egyptians, way back when they built the pyramids, already had olives and olive oil. The olive tree is one of the oldest cultivated fruit trees on the planet! And yes, it's a fruit. It's got a pit, a seed. If it didn't have that pit, it wouldn't be a fruit. It would be a vegetable. If you eat a can of pitted olives, you know, olives without pits, you're still eating fruit. Duh.

The ancient Greeks believed the goddess, Athena, invented the olive. Zeus, the ancient Greek's Godfather of Gods, was so thrilled with Athena's invention he gave her the land known as Attica which is the part of Greece where Athens is located. (Athens... Athena... get it?) Why did Zeus think the olive was so terrific? Because the olive gave his people, the Greeks, light, heat, food, medicine and perfume, and Zeus cared about his Greeks and wanted stuff for them. Good stuff. Stuff they could use.

You'd think Zeus, being such a concerned-for-the-Greeks godfather of all Greek gods and all, would have come up with olives himself. But I guess not. It was a woman's job I suppose. Personally, I'm not sure olive oil perfume works for me as a sexy scent but what do I know?

BTW, I'm not an ancient Greek or a god although I do have a body like a Greek god. Yep. I've been to museums and seen statues of Greek gods and, like them, I don't need too big of a fig leaf either. TMI? Sorry.

Besides being used for cooking and other things, olive oil is used in religious rituals. The Muslim's prophet, Muhammad, told his followers to apply olive oil to their bodies. He used oil on his head, probably to avoid dry, fly-way hair. Hey! It's dry in the desert and between that and the hot sun, you're hair needs help even if you always wear a hat or a turban or whatever it is those desert Muslims wear.  If you're out somewhere and the person next to you smells like olive oil, he or she might be a Muslim. Just saying. Not to be outdone by Muslims, Catholics use olive oil during baptisms and a few other ceremonies. They call it "Holy Oil" but, between you and me, it's just olive oil that's been blessed.

Olive oil can also be used as a name. There's a famous cartoon movie star named Olive Oyl. She replaced the "i" in oil with a "y" but you know how movie stars are. They always have to be different.


Like gasoline, olive oil comes in different grades. There's regular olive oil, virgin olive oil, and extra-virgin olive oil.  The difference between these grades of oil is which pressing the oil comes from. First press = extra-virgin, second press = virgin, and the last press is regular olive oil.  Personally, I'm an extra-virgin olive oil kind of guy. No sloppy seconds or thirds for me.

Cooking with olio d'oliva is something all Italian cooks do. A lot of other kinds of cooks use olive oil too but considering Italian food is the best food on the planet, how they use olive oil in their cooking doesn't matter as much.

You can use olive oil as part of your salad's dressing. I know I sure do. There's no better dressing for your salad than oil and vinegar and the oil has to be olive oil. For vinegar, I like balsamic and other red wine vinegars. You can keep that apple vinegar stuff. It has no business on a salad, but a tablespoon of it in the water you use to make poached eggs is nice. And don't forget: If you're gonna eat your dinner salad like a boss, that is, like an Italian, you eat it after your meal, not before.

You can and should fry with olive oil but it burns at a lower temperature than other cooking oils. All that means is you have to be a little more careful when frying with olio d'oliva. It's worth it as frying with olive oil makes the food taste so much better. Trust me on this. Here's a partial list of things that should be fried in olive oil: meatballs, sausages, braciole, veal cutlets, chicken cutlets, moulinyan (eggplant), all the fish you fry on Christmas Eve for the Festa dei sette pesci (Feast of the Seven Fishes) which includes smelts (C'mon! You gotta make smelts!), shrimp, cod, and calamari. Then, there's stuff like fried zucchini, fried moot-sa-rell (mozzarella), and more. I fry up my peppers-n-eggs with a little olive oil. I love  peppers-n-eggs, and not just for breakfast. But use the Italian sweet frying peppers, also known as Anaheim peppers, and not the bell peppers. I don't have anything against bell peppers but if you're going to make peppers-n-eggs the right way, make them the right way. Again, trust me on this.


Okay. So now you know more about olive oil than you did before reading this. See? This blog is not only entertaining, it's informative and educational. Your welcome.