Olive Oil

My friend Angela and her family finished picking their olives and Wednesday morning had an appointment for crushing them into oil. Did I want to come along? I did want to and off we went. There were several other folks there with their olives and we got to watch the process.

The olives are weighed and then dumped into a basin for the trip up the conveyor belt to the wash process. While traveling the conveyor the leaves and stems are filtered out. The wash process is the timely step in the oil pressing. After washing they are sent to the crusher where the oil is sent in one direction and the residue in another. It passes through two filters and finally into the containers.

It is all a rather straight forward system.

The water heater was an interesting feature as it is fueled by nut hulls.

The mix that is extracted which includes solids that remain after crushing the olives is called ~sansa~. This includes the pits, skin and pulp residue. Another process creates this sansa oil. My friend told me restaurants use alot of this oil.

These pots were on the property. They were used in earlier times to store olive oil.

This is only one way of extracting oil from olives. This place isn't far from Oliveri so it is convenient to have them done there. The proprietor and his wife are pleasant and nice to do business with.

After it was all said and done ...my friends gave me this....LIQUID GOLD!