La Brosa’s authentic italian EVOO

[only pick up]

I’ve got a few liters of my mom’s 2022 (latest harvest) extra virgin olive oil, made from the over 600 olive trees that I’ve helped planting as a teenager, and that are now giving their fruits. I have a few 8 oz bottles that I am making available for you to try it. I promise you have never had anything closer to what olive oil truly is, the pillar of the Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest diets in the world. I suggest you to use it raw to dress salads, soups, and as a fancy appetizer, served with a pinch of salt, and/or with balsamic vinegar, and sourdough bread. It’s truly delicious.

What does extra virgin mean?

I grew up in a farm, cultivating olive trees, harvesting olives to make our own organic extra virgin olive oil. In my cooking classes I explain how to make extra virgin olive oil, and how different it is from virgin olive oil and olive oil. Around October, the very first green olives are beaten off the trees in a timely manner, because those are the best of the best, and their oil has the most nourishing properties – the properties so celebrated when talking about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. However, those olives have little oil, so the yield is low, and the price is high, also because they require a lot of care in order to timely harvest them and squeeze them. Their olive oil is called extra virgin, because it comes from olives that are still alive, so it has the pH of a living cell, and because of that it maintains its nourishing properties for a lot longer as well.

Many olives remain on the trees and those are allowed to naturally fall on the nets, and are then harvested weekly after being under the sun and the weather for days, to ripe, but also, unfortunately, to rot a little. Nothing gets thrown away and also those olives are squeezed because olive oil is often only made every two years, as olive trees have a biannual cycle, and every other year the olives are very few. The olive coming from those olives is called virgin olive oil, or ultimately just olive oil, based on the pH: the more acidic it is, the less virgin it is. This kind of olive oil does not have the same nourishing properties as the extra virgin one, and we often use it as body lotion or to make soap. Some people sell that oil to companies who want to buy it. Indeed, in order to use the label “extra virgin” on a bottle of olive oil, there are several quality standards to be met, and one can’t cheat on that. So, Companies that sell olive oil tend to invest more in lower quality oils. They often repurpose olive oil by pooling together many kinds of low quality oils and then make them undergo chemical reactions to give it the color they need, but those oils have very low nourishing properties. However, only who was born and raised in farm knows all this. My oil is made with love by my family, as we make it for our own consumption, we do not sell it if not in a limited amount.

I have seen people getting ecstatic about my olive oil, as I allow my friends and cooking classes’ students to taste it, so I’ve decided to make you try it to, so you’ll learn how real Italian extra virgin olive oil is supposed to taste like.