2008 Olive Harvest - The End

The unreliable neighbor in our mini-cooperative still has not returned to Izzalini to pick his olives. The rest of us have decided to quietly eliminate him from our group effort. Next year we'll look for another partner. Or maybe our own trees will have such an abundance of fruit we won't need one. Time will tell.


In the meantime, we're looking forward to transferring our oil to one-liter bottles and celebrating the harvest with bruschetta. There's nothing quite as satisfactory as slicing up a loaf of day-old country-style bread, toasting it over wood coals and then annointing it with fresh, home-grown oil. Our local bread, called pane comune, is made without salt and is a perfect foil for the tasting. Thereafter, I do sprinkle a bit of salt on the bread but I don't tell anybody.

If you'd like to see bruschetta-making, click on today's title.

We have the oil!

Murphy's Law has no exceptions. At 07.30 on Friday morning Amedeo, Tibero and I formed a caravan of olive-laden vehicles and raced off to our frantoio on the outskirts of Todi. There were about six olive-growers in line ahead of us, so we alternately kept an eye on our crates and wandered around chatting with folks we knew. We passed the entire morning in this way and it was a long, chilly wait.

About 13.00, we weighed in, registered and returned home; the mill owner would phone us when our turn to press came up. Instead, he called late in the afternoon with the news that various parts of the machinery had broken down. All bets were off for Friday.

The following morning dawned brightly and at high noon we were summoned. Yippee! We helped pour the lovely olives into the collection chute, watched them pass through the leaf-blower and laundry and then sighed as they disappeared into one of five individual mills.

It takes about two hours for the olives to be processed and there's nothing to see except a hazy glimpse of a small vertical mill going around and around with bits of olive clinging to it. When the mechanism decides there's no more fruit to be had, the whole mess is automatically separated into oil, water, pulp and pits.

The precious, cold-pressed oil goes one way and the other elements are carried off to recycle-land. Pulp is excellent fertilizer and the pits are ground up and used to form artificial fireplace logs -- the kind you buy in city supermarkets.

Our yield was pretty puny, but after last year's crop failure we were delighted to take home any oil at all. Now we wait for at least another week until the sediment has settled to the bottom of our 50-liter stainless container. The sediment is bitter and you don't want it on your salad.

I did taste our oil at the mill and wow! It's going to be great.

Olive Oil Crisis in Izzalini: a neighbor lets us down

Of all the harvests that take place during the year, there are two which require careful timing and the full cooperation of everyone involved: (1) the picking and fast processing of wine grapes before the whole crop is spoiled and (2) the olive harvest, for exactly the same reason.

Well, our 2008 olive raccolta became complicated at the end of last week because the third member of our informal neighborhood cooperative became uncooperative. This guy rang us from his apartment in Rome to say he'd decided not to come up over the weekend, the time slot scheduled for the harvest of his grove in Izzalini. His excuse was that it was raining in Rome so maybe it would also rain in Todi and he'd prefer to pick the olives on November 29 and 30. Uh-huh.

This carpetbagger -- I'll call him Buffone -- knew full well that Amedeo and I had already picked our olives and were waiting for his to meet the required minimum weight for a private pressing -- about 250 kg. We had carefully placed the olives in special containers and stored them in cool semi-darkness, but there is a limit to how long you can leave them before they mold or rot. By postponing our harvest of his grove, Buffone was exceeding that limit by a full week. You bet we were mad.

Amedeo, Antonietta and I had an emergency meeting to consider our options. The first would be to take our crates of olives to the mill and leave them to be mixed with small quantities brought in by others. This horrified my friends, who are definitely purists when it comes to the quality of olive oil. They're convinced that our lovingly-sorted fruit would be tossed into the mill with wormy, moldy, dried up and rotting olives from careless or evil-doing homeowners. No way would they accept just any old oil in return for the weight we delivered. It was essential to have a private pressing.

The second option would be to purchase raw olives from another source. This plan was adopted and Amedeo spent the entire weekend searching for healthy olives. On Sunday afternoon he located an acceptable grove in the next province over and made a deal to buy the extra kilograms we needed.

However, there wasn't enough time to keep our first appointment at the mill yesterday morning. We rescheduled and will now press on Friday. Fortunately the weather is cool and we're hoping the four days we've lost won't affect our stored harvest. We're thinking good thoughts and not even turning on a light to peek at the crates, let alone touch the precious olives.