We've returned from our holiday break, reinvigorated and ready to dive back into the world of our Massican cookbook. In the past eighteen months, we've embarked on a culinary tour of Italy, crafting over 70 recipes from ten distinct regions. Our journey has been rich and varied, featuring three comprehensive chapters dedicated to the happiness of Pasta, an homage to Pizza, a festive celebration of the classic Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, and culminating in New York with a heartwarming Italian-American dinner party. Our mission remains to bring the warmth and conviviality of the Italian table into your homes. Before introducing more dinner party menus, we're excited to embark on a new chapter: curating your pantry with Italian essentials.
In today's installment, we delve into the cornerstone of Italian cuisine: olive oil. This is just the beginning of our exploration that will cover the essentials of the Italian pantry, from anchovies to flour, tomatoes, cured meats, cheeses, kinds of vinegar, salts, and a selection of beverages ranging from coffee to amaro. Guided by the celebrated writer and our cookbook's author, Jordan MacKay, we'll navigate these traditional Italian foodstuffs. We welcome your insights, favorite products, or any pantry secrets you'd love to share in the comments. So, without further ado, let's get into it.
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Olive Oil by Jordan Mackay
Cut a small incision into the arm of most Italians, and the viscous liquid to ooze out would likely not be crimson but rather greenish-gold. Since ancient times, olive oil has flowed through the kitchens of Italians - and, likewise, their bodies.
The one indispensable ingredient in Italian cuisine, olive oil serves as a cooking medium, lubricant, shortening, and flavoring agent (not to mention body lotion and hair tonic). Amazingly, it’s as central today as it was to Caesar or Pliny, hence the importance of knowing how to stock, store, and deploy it in your kitchen.
Wine and olive production go hand-in-hand. Olive trees thrive everywhere grapevines flourish - around the Mediterranean basin and wine-producing regions of the New World. These gorgeous trees with distinctively silvery green leaves don’t like extreme cold or wetness; they tolerate heat quite well and produce compelling fruit, dependent on variety and terroir. Yes, the olive is a fruit - just an extremely bitter one, requiring processing (like curing) to enjoy it as food. The oil, however, comes from fresh, unadulterated fruit and depends on precise harvesting and quick, skillful processing to yield high-quality results.
Olive oil is famously marketed by grade. Virgin oil is the most important designation, meaning the oil was extracted from olives only by mechanical means: cold pressing. It’s the first oil to come out of the olives. But after virgin oil, the extraction process continues, depending on chemical or other physical processes and rendering colorless, flavorless oil like canola or vegetable oil. Most stores today carry options in two categories: extra-virgin and plain olive oil (also sometimes labeled as “pure” or “light”).
Extra-virgin olive is technically defined by its low free fatty acid content, a characteristic determined by precision during harvest and care during processing. Extra-virgins vary in quality, personality, and cost. (Virgin olive oil is a lesser category that today lacks relevance.) In contrast, regular or “pure” olive oil is refined olive oil blended with a little (usually 5-15%) virgin oil. Olive oil called “light” refers not to it containing fewer calories - it doesn’t – but instead is the marketing term for the inferior oil extracted through industrial means and lacking any olive character.
While most cookbooks suggest keeping two kinds of olive oils in your pantry, we recommend three. Inexpensive and practical, plain olive oil serves well for cooking. All the cautions about not heating olive oil because of its low smoke point are rubbish. Recent testing has discovered that olive oil shares the robustness of other cooking oils when heated to higher temperatures. However, the delicate flavors of extra-virgin oil diminish during cooking (except for deep frying), so plain olive oils are more economical for searing, sautéing, and baking.
High-quality extra-virgin oils contribute flavor and texture, so use them in their raw state for dressings or as a finishing drizzle. Here, you can stock two types of extra-virgin: a golden, buttery version and one more on the greener, pepperier side. These qualities vary from place to place and oil to oil. For instance, Tuscan oils are often fruity and somewhat spicy, great for salads or over vegetables and meats. Umbrian oils are fruity and rich - great for pasta and proteins. Finesse-driven Ligurian olive oils sport fruity and buttery qualities - wonderful over fish and vegetables. Buttery Lazio oils enhance the richness of meats and fish.
Ultimately, let your palate decide the best oil for each situation. But once you have the bottles, store them and use them diligently. Please keep them in dark, cool places. They only degrade with time, so don’t let them linger. Use them generously and regularly, and buy fresh bottles often. A liberal drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil improves pretty much everything - from steak to fish to steamed vegetables to chocolate cake or vanilla ice cream. Do this long enough, and perhaps when you next bleed, it will be like an Italian.