The (Food) Oil Wars

[dessiato]

Some of the best fried eggs I've ever had were in Spain. I've tried recreating it with the olive oil here but it's not the same.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to get good Spanish oil in the U.K. Most Seems to be Italian, which is often a blend of Italian and Spanish oils, or Greek which, at least in the U.K., has a much stronger, often pepper, flavour. The other issue is, of course, storage. Olive oil needs cool dark places to stop it going off. It also, unlike what my f-i-l says, doesn’t last for months, and years. We never keep ours for more than two weeks. But we really do use, easily, a litre in that time.

I learned a lot when I was working at a table olive, and olive oil producer.

 

[pogofish]

In Scotland we use rapeseed, the olive oil there is dreadful. Even the so-called quality oils in the supermarkets are very poor quality compared to Spain. We’ve even noticed that the olive oil in Galicia is not as good as that in Andalucia.

I thought this was going to be about the Ukrainian war causing problems of sunflower oil supply. It’s so bad here people are restricted to only 5 litres at a time.

Yup - initially, when it was introduced as an EU subsidy-driven crop in the late 80s/1990s, most Scottish rapeseed went for low-value, industrial/animal feed applications but in the last few years, they have woken-up to its quality being rather better than expected for these northerly climes and a good number of producers are now selling it in the higher-value/quality edible market and it has become pretty easy to find a range of good quality oils.

As well as ordinary sunflower oil, Ukraine produces/refines most of Europe's supply of healthier high-oleic sunflower oil and it as one of the few parts of Europe with a suitable climate, had also undergone major investment into establishing palm-oil production for biofuels, ironically because it was considered more politically "stable" than most of the traditional producer countries!