Buy at Olive Oil Lovers
We love premium extra-virgin olive oil to dress salads and grains or to finish dishes—including pasta, grilled steak, fish, vegetables, beans, hummus, soup, pizza, and even ice cream—with a drizzle of flavor-enhancing goodness. While supermarket extra-virgin olive oil can do all of those things, we think it’s worth getting your hands on a bottle of premium extra-virgin olive oil, because it offers exponentially fuller, fresher, more delightful flavor.
We can make that claim because we tested it.
We bought and anonymously tasted nearly three dozen premium and supermarket extra-virgin olive oils. While we liked supermarket oils, we loved the premium versions. Our tasters repeatedly described premium extra-virgin olive oils as significantly more aromatic and flavorful, enthusiastically ranking them higher with comments such as “vibrant,” “rounded and smooth, rich-bodied,” “sweet and buttery at first sip, then opens up to be grassy and fruity and pungent. Really delightful!” “It leaves such a nice aftertaste as I reach for more.” One taster just raved: “Holy cow, that is delicious!”
If you haven’t yet explored the world of premium olive oil, or maybe you’ve tried some once and didn’t like it much, maybe it’s time for another look. If you’ve been led to believe that all premium extra-virgin olive oil is a huge pungent, peppery flavor explosion, we can help you find a wide range of oils at every flavor intensity, including the mildest, most delicate, buttery, nutty oils and delicious medium-fruity, bright, sweet-tasting oils that will wow you. (And if you love those big peppery oils, we’ve also got you covered.)
Why Are Premium Extra-Virgin Olive Oils More Expensive?
All that extra flavor comes at a price. Compared to mass-produced supermarket versions, premium extra-virgin olive oils in our lineup averaged about $1.78 per ounce, over twice as much as the average supermarket extra-virgin olive oils we tasted, which averaged about $0.67 per ounce.
It’s not about fancy labels and marketing hype: Premium extra-virgin olive oil is a fresh, seasonal product specifically crafted to offer a huge range of distinctive flavors and characteristics that set each individual oil apart.
Are These Instagram-Famous Olive Oils Any Good?
We tasted three new brands of olive oil to see how they measured up.More labor-intensive to produce than supermarket olive oil, premium olive oil is made in comparatively small batches, under the expert curation of an olive-oil maker who supervises the olives’ cultivation on a single estate or from a group of cooperative farms and selects the optimal time and method for processing them. While there are nearly 1,500 olive cultivars to choose from, even the same olives when picked early and green create oil with different flavors than when picked ripe and black.
Every step has to be done carefully to maintain the olives’ freshness, avoid any flavor defects created by delays or rough handling, and extract the best possible oil. Harvesting takes more effort: Often, olives for premium oils are hand-harvested, especially when they grow on older trees in heritage groves. By contrast, supermarket oils can be machine-harvested, from certain cultivars of olives that can grow in hedges for easy reaping. Yields can be much smaller, too, if the oil maker selects early-harvest olives for premium oil; they contain less oil per olive because they are underripe. Like winemakers or perfumers, olive-oil makers use their skills to create the best single varietal or blends, often making adjustments depending on the conditions of that growing season.
Speed is essential at every step, from getting the olives off the trees at their peak to the moment when the bottle of oil arrives in your kitchen. And even if production went perfectly, all extra-virgin olive oils have a limited shelf life before their extraordinary qualities begin to diminish, since time, heat, light, and air exposure all degrade the flavor—even if the bottle hasn’t been opened. The same factors also diminish the natural presence in the oil of antioxidants called polyphenols; these not only help make it taste vibrant and fresh but also have the most health benefits. Finally, remember that this whole process starts anew annually, since olives are harvested only once a year. Premium olive oil retailers typically discount and sell off last year’s oil before the newest harvest arrives. Given all of these factors, it’s not that surprising that premium oils cost more.
But consider this: You might pay about the same for a bottle of premium extra-virgin olive oil and a good bottle of wine, but you’ll be enjoying that olive oil for a few months—unlike the wine that’s gone in a day or two.
What’s the Best Way to Use Premium Extra-Virgin Olive Oil?
Premium extra-virgin olive oil is best used raw or lightly heated. While there’s nothing wrong with cooking with any extra-virgin olive oil, heat drives off those special volatile aroma and flavor compounds that the best premium olive oil brings to a dish. There are less expensive olive oil options for high-heat applications.
“People should think of olive oil the way they think of salt and pepper, it brings out the flavors of that food, and helps the food realize its full potential.”
Premium extra-virgin olive oil functions in multiple ways when you add it to a dish. First, it contributes its own aroma and flavor, where it might taste buttery or grassy, herbal or fruity, nutty or floral, peppery or sweet or bitter to enhance or contrast with the flavors of the food. Second, as a fat, it activates and spreads food’s fat-soluble aroma and flavor compounds throughout the dish. Finally, it provides a hint of rich, silky texture. “People should think of olive oil the way they think of salt and pepper,” said Brad Hedeman, head of product selection for Zingermans.com. “It brings out the flavors of that food, and helps the food realize its full potential.” Premium extra-virgin olive oils are as distinct as fingerprints. The region, growing conditions, type of olive, time of harvest, blending or single varietals, and other factors contribute to unique flavor profiles. Processing changes the oil’s flavor, too, including whether olives are mechanically crushed and centrifuged to extract oil, as most modern producers do, or whether they use ancient systems including stone-grinding and/or hand-skimming oil as it rises to the top of the water and juices from crushed olives. Most premium oils are filtered to remove minuscule suspended olive particles that hasten spoilage, but some are sold unfiltered. Despite these differences, there are three main flavor characteristics that experts look for in all extra-virgin olive oil: fruitiness, bitterness, and pungency. To be defined as extra-virgin oil, the baseline is simple: It only needs to have zero flavor defects and some fruitiness.
Bitterness and pungency, that burning sensation in the back of your throat that can make you cough, which is often associated with premium olive oils, can be challenging to some tasters. Not every premium olive oil is pungent, though. “Pungency is more pronounced in earlier harvested fruit and is often referred to as ‘peppery’ on labels and in marketing,” says Alexandra Kicenik Devarenne, author of Olive Oil: A Field Guide (2014), and director of the Extra Virgin Alliance, now the specialty olive oil section of the North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA), a not-for-profit trade group. Bitterness is something we appreciate in foods such as coffee and dark chocolate, Devarenne pointed out, noting that an oil with pronounced bitterness complements other strong flavors. The peppery pungency of fresh, early-harvest premium olive oil, identified as oleocanthal, has been linked to its anti-inflammatory properties, and—like bitterness—is a flavor enhancer with food.
How to Use Mild, Medium and Robust Premium Extra-Virgin Olive Oils
In the chart, we grouped the premium extra-virgin olive oils into categories that describe their flavor intensity, from mild to robust. With Devarenne’s help, we defined how you might best use the oils in each category:
Mild-intensity premium extra-virgin olive oils add subtle, delicate notes such as fruity, floral, and lightly herbal flavors, while enhancing the flavors of milder foods where a bolder oil might overwhelm a dish, including salads made with tender butter lettuce or mushrooms, fish, and sweeter vegetables, such as peas and carrots. They’re a good choice for baking and alongside citrus flavors. They’re also delicious for dipping bread.
Medium-intensity premium extra-virgin olive oils are the most versatile and are especially delicious in vinaigrettes; for finishing pasta and vegetable dishes to bring out aromatics; or on starches such as brown rice, potatoes, or simple toast with toppings. They contribute herbaceous notes to any dish and are great for dipping bread.
Robust-intensity premium extra-virgin olive oils work best as a condiment drizzled over hot foods, such as grilled meats, fish and vegetables, or hearty soups and beans, since heat tempers the perception of the oils’ bitterness, which can overwhelm delicate flavors. They work well with acidic foods such as fresh and cooked tomatoes, including bold tomato-based sauces. They’re especially good when dipping crusty whole-wheat bread.
When selecting premium extra-virgin olive oil, consider how you intend to use the oil and how mild or intense you want it to be. If you’re new to this category, some experts suggest starting with milder oils and working your way up to medium-intensity and robust oils. Hedeman of Zingerman’s likes to introduce newcomers to buttery, mild olive oils made from riper olives. “Everyone knows what it’s like to taste and cook with butter,” Hedeman said. “It’s an easy leap.”
But many home cooks seek bolder flavors, Devarenne suggested. “Look at the sales of condiments like sriracha and chile crisp,” she said. If you’re in this category, try a robust oil.
The Best Premium Extra-Virgin Olive Oil: Up to You
To create our tasting lineup, we gathered recommendations from olive oil experts and purchased the most recent harvest of premium extra-virgin olive oils from a variety of the biggest olive oil–producing countries. (Also, see our tasting of supermarket extra-virgin olive oils.)
We recommended all of these oils and organized them by flavor intensity, from mild to robust. It’s a helpful way to gauge how they’ll taste and what you might like. To help you get started, we’ve also tagged our tasters’ three highest-ranked favorites overall, which fortuitously included mild, medium, and robust oils.
Our lineup is a sampling of many more premium extra-virgin olive oils that are made all over the world. We hope we’ve got you started to continue exploring and enjoying many more.
- Plain, with bread for dipping
- Identifying labels and markings were removed
- Samples were randomized and assigned three-digit codes to prevent bias
- Consulted olive-oil experts Alexandra Kicenik Devarenne, director, Extra Virgin Alliance; Joseph R. Profaci, executive director, North American Olive Oil Association; Brad Hedeman, head of product selection, Zingerman’s; and Joanne Lacina, president, oliveoillovers.com to develop tasting lineup
Buy at Zingerman's
Buy at La Tienda
Buy at iGourmet
