The Production Phases of Caliando’s Farm’s Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

The Harvest

The soil in which are set the most olive groves is clay and rocky, rich in organic matter which improves the structure of the soil and retains water and nutrients to prevent the heavy rainfall from bringing them underground.

The olive harvest is a delicate operation that has a direct and irreversible impact on the Extra Virgin Olive Oil quality. The olives’ ripening stage, and so the choice of the right moment for collecting them, positively determine the organoleptic characteristics of the oil. The best time is when the skin has taken on a red-black wine color.

Harvesting is done exclusively with the separation of the olives from the tree manually and mechanically:

1. Manually by the technique of stripping, which consists in the manual detachment of the fruits; It is used for plants not excessively high.
2. >Mechanically through the technique of shaking which consists in the separation of the olives from the tree for effect of the branches’oscillations caused by the vibrating elements (shakers).

Obviously, to get the highest quality, the olives must not touch the ground so nets are put meanwhile harvesting by both techniques.

Olives are placed in special 25-30 Kg perforated small boxes to avoid overheating. After the harvesting operations are completed on a daily basis, it is equally important that the olives are transported with every precaution to the mill in order to be pressed within 24 hours from collection.

The Oil Production: The mill

The mini-mill the company is equipped with has a processing system aimed to obtain a high quality organic extra virgin olive oil, such as the one that used to be obtained by the ancient systems of squeezing presses.

In fact, this mini-mill, all in stainless steel and so one hundred percent washable, is the modern system replacing the old presses.

One feature the systems share is cold pressing. This allows to get a much thicker oil, having a higher yield and an economic advantage in saving quantities, and a healthy benefit because the beneficial substances contained in olives are not ruined and flow directly into the oil, as for example, the polyphenols that are excellent antioxidants.

Milling Phases

Four processing steps:

1. Defoliation: removal of the leaves, and washing of the olives.
2. Pressing: crushing the olives getting an oily paste.
3. Kneading the dough: it is a mixing of the oily paste aiming to break the emulsion between oil and water and to facilitate their separation in the next step.
4. Oil extraction: it has the purpose of separating the oil from pomace and water. It’s cold-pressed, without the addition of hot water. It is realized by a low number of centrifuge revolutions to prevent the oil from being damaged by overheating, due to high motion.

Preservation

The oil is stored in stainless steel silos perfectly closed to avoid the rays of light and the contact with air may alter it. These silos are located in a room with a temperature ranging from 14-15 ° c to 20 ° c, which is the optimum temperature to avoid any alterations.