Olives and Olive oil

 

"Except the vine, there is no plant which bears a fruit of as great importance as the olive."

Pliny (AD 23-79)

From the windows of the high speed train from Madrid to Granada, rows of olive trees stretch to the horizon.   Up and down hills, curving around bends, marching off into the distance.   Small fields of knarled misshapen old trees, long fields of young uniform trees, newly turned fields of stick-like baby trees – olive trees everywhere.   On the bus between Granada and Seville, same thing.   On the train from Seville to Malaga, ditto.

 Spain grows olives – more than France, more than Italy. In fact, Spain is the world’s largest producer and exporter of olives and olive oil, with 300 million trees. and 92 percent of the 5.19 million acres of olive groves is allotted to olive oil production.  According to the following article, only 20 percent is exported, which means that 80 percent is consumed in Spain.   Which explains a lot.

For more than you probably want to know about Spanish olive oil, olive trees, etc, here’s the link.

http://www.iberianature.com/material/olives.html

Spanish olive oil has been making its way over the Pyrenees and down to Italy since Roman times; archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of huge amphoras used to transport the oil.   Turns out a lot of the ‘Italian’ olive oil in your grocery store may be bottled in Italy, but the olives that produced it came from Spain.  

Olive oil seems to be lifeblood here.  Café tables hold a bottle of extra-virgin, rich and greeny-gold, just like American restaurant tables hold bottles of ketsup.   I watched people at breakfast dousing their tostadas con tomate (my favorite) with at least a quarter cup of olive oil.   It comes on sandwiches and nearly everything else.   It tastes great.   What more could you ask?

Well, you could ask for some of the olives before they get turned into oil.  Every beer and glass of wine in a bar or café come with a small dish of olives, olives come with tapas (or they are tapas), and the grocery shelves have more kinds of olives than Americans have potato chips.  Most of these are green olives, and delicious – not salty, but with a meaty quality I’m still trying to figure out.  The most toothsome ones I tasted were in Malaga, but both Seville and Granada had fantastic ones as wel

Our local olive store in Seville, just down the street from the apartment, let us taste before buying, but we never did find exactly the one we were looking for.  Have to keep trying.