Salad bars have become a nutritional disaster over the past half century. The concept was introduced in 1959, in Philadelphia. The idea was a good one: Get diners to eat more vegetables. But what’s actually happened since then is that diners often pile vast portions of unrelated items on their plates. The salad bar has morphed into an excuse for overeating.

Our friends Rafi Taherian and Joyce Goldstein recently set out to reinvent the salad bar. Yale University was the subject of their experiment. Rafi is the executive director of Yale Dinning. Joyce, an author and food-industry consultant, teamed with Rafi to perform a radical overhaul of the salad bars scattered around the Yale campus. Their goal: create a limited number of healthy, delicious salads for the students in the format of a salad bar.

The first thing they did was to slash the number of choices students had. “We ended up with four items. We had 22 to 23 items,” Rafi said. He was speaking last month to a packed room of university food service directors and chefs.  Rafi and Joyce gave their presentation at the National Association of College & University Food Services’ annual conference in San Jose.

The two began working on the overhaul earlier this year. They didn’t want to cut corners on cost, opting to use high-quality ingredients. The salad dressings, for example, would be made from scratch using good extra virgin olive oil and vinegar. No bottled dressings allowed.

Joyce, who’s written an entire book on salads entitled Mediterranean Fresh (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), developed four different salads, focusing on grains, beans and roasted vegetables. Two of the choices: cannellini bean salad with sun-dried tomato vinaigrette, and Tuscan sweet pepper and potato salad with a garlic and basil dressing. (Both are pictured above. You can see food-service recipes for both dishes here.)

To see if students would take to the idea, Rafi and Joyce performed two test runs of the new salad bar offerings last spring. Rafi admitted he was “more scared than everybody else that day. We were going to change 50 years of culture, 50 years of paradigm.”

The more than 20 items on the Yale salad bars were gone. The new vegetable salads took their place. Rafi and Joyce held their breaths … and then let out a huge sigh of relief.

“The students came over later and said thank you,” said Joyce. “We didn’t see wasted food. They just ate it.”

Added Rafi: “Overall, this has been a very good experience.”

Yale students coming to school for the fall semester will have the opportunity to try the new salad bar.

A quick note: After I returned from the NACUFS conference I read an interesting article in The Washington Post about how Uncle Sam is trying to improve the quality of food offered in federal employee cafeterias. For good ideas, the Feds should look at what Rafi and Joyce have done at Yale.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Important news out today in the olive oil world: A major study finds U.S. consumers often pay premium prices for imported olive oil labeled “extra virgin” when in fact it’s cheaper, lower quality oil.

Tests conducted at two respected laboratories revealed that 69% of the imported oils labeled extra virgin failed to meet taste, smell and chemical standards established by the International Olive Council (IOC) and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Only one of the 10 California-made olive oils labeled extra virgin failed to meet the standards.

The defective oils included many leading and private label brands. They were bought at supermarkets and big box retailers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

“The oils that failed our tests had defects such as rancidity and many of these oils did not taste good,” said Dan Flynn, executive director of the Olive Center at the University of California, Davis. “Before this study, we had anecdotal reports of poor quality olive oil being sold as extra virgin but now we have empirical proof.”

Full disclosure: California Olive Ranch helped fund the study. But we had no influence on the methodology, brand selection, or outcome.

The study was conducted jointly by the UC Davis Olive Oil Chemistry Laboratory and the Australian Oils Research Laboratory, a government research center and certified IOC testing laboratory.

Our Everyday California Fresh EVOO was among the brands tested. The study confirmed our Fresh EVOO complied fully with the IOC and USDA’s standards for extra virgin olive oil, as well as stricter standards established by the California Olive Oil Council (COOC).

All three sets of standards stipulate that olive oil labeled extra virgin can’t have any “defects.” The imported oils that failed to meet the international standards were found to be too old, of poor quality, and adulterated with cheaper, refined olive oil. The defective California oil didn’t pass taste and aroma standards created by the IOC and USDA.

For the study, researchers bought 52 samples of 14 readily available imported brands and 5 California brands of olive oil sold under extra virgin olive oil labels.

The oils were divided and analyzed by the California and Australian researchers. They tested the oils for their taste, aroma and chemical makeup.

We like to tell people our oil is significantly better and fresher than mass-produced oils imported into the United States from overseas.

For starters, the olives are grown in California’s unique “terroir” and pressed at our state-of-the-art mills here. Our oil doesn’t sit on a cargo ship for several weeks, journeying across the ocean.

Working closely with our skilled “ranchers,” we’re very careful about choosing the optimal time to harvest the olives in the fall. Our employees then get the olives from tree to mill quickly.

How? We plant our trees using a system known as “super high-density plantings.” It allows us to grow the trees in hedge rows of 570 to 670 trees per acre, versus traditional plantings of 100 to 150 per acre.

That way, employees driving our harvesting machines can harvest the trees more rapidly – and deliver the olives within hours to our mills, where they’re crushed into EVOO. It’s this speed which prevents the olive from decomposing before we extract the oil.

Part of the reason bogus EVOO can be sold in this country is because there are no federal standards governing quality. The USDA recently adopted standards meant to ensure the bottle of extra virgin olive oil you buy at the store is genuine and not some fake EVOO.

The new federal standards, however, are voluntary. They go into effect this fall.

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Occasionally we blow our own horns. We recently learned our Miller’s Blend extra virgin olive oil was named one of the top 250 olive oils in the world by a noted German food magazine.

The magazine Der Feinschmecker and “Mastri Oleari,” a prestigious Italian-based group of olive oil “masters,” gave us the award. Der Feinschmecker is considered the equivalent of Food & Wine magazine in Germany. It evaluated 850 extra virgin olive oil brands from 20 countries in its competition.

To echo our chief executive Gregg Kelley, we’re thrilled and encouraged by the recognition. This was the first year we entered the competition.

“The German consumer is one of the most discerning in the world when evaluating olive oil,” Gregg said. “This recognition continues to validate the quality of our products and the care and effort with which our team of professionals produces our full assortment of extra virgin olive oils.”

Our Miller’s Blend is a combination of oils chosen by our veteran miller, Bob Singletary. Bob selects certain oils to produce aromas of fruit on the nose, buttery mid-palate flavors, and a slightly peppery finish. It’s a robust EVOO offering lush notes of artichoke, green tomato, and almond on the palate. It pairs well with flavorful, spicy dishes, sautéed or slow roasted meats, and smoked fish or salt cod dishes.

Der Feinschmecker, which means gourmet in English, has held the Olio Awards since 2002. The magazine gathers a team of international experts and the magazine’s editorial staff to evaluate hundreds of high quality-olive oils from the United States, Greece, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere around the globe. The June issue of the magazine features the highlights of the 2010 competition.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Joyce Goldstein grabbed a bottle of olive oil. The chef and award-winning cookbook author was on stage at the Culinary Institute of America’s Napa Valley campus demonstrating a Tuscan seafood and pasta dish. “More olive oil with impunity,” declared Goldstein jokingly as she poured what I’d consider to be a good, healthy dose of olive oil into a pan.

A gasp went up among some members of the audience.

“No gasping! I don’t want any gasping,” warned Goldstein, playfully admonishing some members of the the audience. The group was made up of doctors, nutritionists, nurses, and other medical as well as culinary professionals.

“Olive oil is good for you,” Goldstein added. “I’m one of those people who throws the olive oil in the pan.”

So began the first of many cooking demonstrations that will be held at the CIA’s Greystone campus in northern California.  We drove here Thursday afternoon for a three-day conference focused on food that not only tastes good – but is good for you. The title of the conference: “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives.”

The gathering has attracted nearly 500 people in the medical and culinary fields. The goal: Get more and more people to lead healthy lives by passing along the knowledge of how to cook nutritious foods that tastes good.

“It’s not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery,” said David Eisenberg, himself an accomplished cook and director of the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, which is co-sponsoring the conference.

We anticipate extra virgin olive oil will be featured quite a bit here. More people will get a chance to hear about the health benefits of EVOO, including it’s healthful polyphenols and monounsaturated fats, and lack its lack of unhealthy trans fats.

During the conference, Goldstein and other chefs will be putting on cooking  demonstrations focused on such topics as “beans and greens” or “healthy flavors of the Mediterranean.” We’ll be sharing recipes from here in the coming days and weeks that feature EVOO.

But it’s not all cooking and eating. We’ll also be attending talks focused on health and nutrition, given by faculty members from the CIA, the Harvard School of Public Health, and elsewhere.

We’ll keep you posted.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Anniston, and hundreds of other Hollywood A-listers are about to tuck into a meal that makes use of our extra virgin olive oil.

I kid you not. Our Olio Nuovo EVOO will be one of the ingredients used to prepare the dinner at the Golden Globe Awards Show Dinner on Jan. 17, at the Beverly Hilton. The hotel’s executive chef, Suki Sugiura, began planning the menu for the gala bash half a year ago. It’s thrown by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In the photo – which shows our EVOO – Chef Suki is providing a media preview of the dinner he’ll be serving.

The chef — a veteran of four Golden Globe dinners — is a big fan of our EVOO. And he is no stranger to the appetites of Tinseltown’s heavyweights. “I know what their tastes are because I’ve been doing this many, many years,” he told the Associated Press.

For the dinner, Chef Suki is serving a locally inspired menu showcasing the bounty of California’s agriculture. Every ingredient will come from the Golden State, from our Olio Nuovo to the mozzarella and beef short ribs.

“This is a message from California,” Chef Suki told the AP. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that some of the finest ingredients in the U.S. are right here in California.”

The chef also is adhering to a California theme of “cooking light.”

“There’s not so much butter. And cream — forget it,” he told the AP.

Instead, according to the news agency: “Fresh herbs and local olive oil add flavor to the appetizer salad and the beef and sea bass entree (that comes from Central and Southern California).”

The entree, for example, will pair our EVOO with an aged balsamic vinegar that accompanies the sautéed sea bass and the herb-braised short ribs.

Chef Suki and his kitchen staff of more than 100 have been busy getting ready. Some 1,700 meals are expected to be served at events tied to the Golden Globes. The Jan. 17 gala banquet alone is expected to draw nearly 1,300 movers and shakers. The chef also is responsible for preparing the food for a half dozen parties thrown after the big dinner.

He and his team are prepared to work from 6 a.m. to well past midnight on the 17th.

“It’s the busiest day of the year,” he told the AP.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

My colleague Roger Fillion recently returned from a Culinary Institute of America conference in California’s Napa Valley, at the CIA’s Greystone campus. The topic: street foods and comfort foods of the world. Roger was busy, meeting chefs, culinary pros, and even former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. He sampled a lot of different foods: from Mexican tamales and Peruvian roast pig, to pepper crab from Singapore and mussels and white beans from Italy. Roger sent me the following note about his trip.

I got to see first-hand how much Greek and Italian cuisines rely on extra virgin olive oil.

“My dad once said I use too much olive oil,” said Chef Jim Botsacos. Shrugging his shoulders during a cooking demonstration, he drizzled more EVOO into the pot. “You can’t get enough.”

Botsacos is chef and partner at the critically acclaimed Greek restaurant Molyvos and the Italian eatery Abboccato, both in New York. I learned something from him I hadn’t realized about Greek food: Black-eyed peas are a part of the cuisine.

“People are always surprised when I tell them black-eyed peas are used in Greek cooking,” said Chef Botsacos as he prepared a dish of slow-cooked black-eyed peas with onions, tomato and wild greens.

Chef Botsacos demonstrated a Greek form of cooking known as traditional lather style. It comes from the Modern Greek word for olive oil: lathi. The dishes are slowly cooked on the stove top in rich olive oil-based sauces.

For the black-eye pea dish, red onions were braised in extra virgin olive oil until soft and translucent. Chopped tomatoes, garlic and more EVOO were added. This was followed by cooked black-eyed peas. Blanched greens such as Swiss chard, kale, mustard greens, or dandelions were placed in the pot. Fresh spinach was folded-in at the end to give the dish “a fresh vibrant appearance and flavor.”

It was real Greek comfort food.

I’ll be sharing more of Roger’s dispatches with you.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

It’s been a whirlwind couple of days here in northern California. But it’s been great. We wrapped up our Harvest Retreat for chefs, wholesalers, and others late last night, following a fabulous dinner showcasing California Olive Ranch extra virgin olive oils. It was prepared by Chef Kurt Spataro at the Italian restaurant in Sacramento bearing his last name. I returned to my room at the nearby Citizen Hotel at close to 11 p.m.

I was tired but pleased with the day’s events. We’d begun at 8 a.m. yesterday morning at  the Citizen, with our large group boarding two buses for a two-hour trip north to our mill in Artois.

Now that I’ve had a little shut-eye and cleared some work off my desk, I want to give you an update on how our olive harvest and milling operations are proceeding. I also want to give you a flavor of the tour we gave our guests Tuesday at our Artois ranch.

The outlook is good for the 2009 harvest. We began harvesting our olive trees earlier this month and pressing the fruit into EVOO.

The person who manages our orchard operations and those of our contract growers, Adam Englehardt, told our guests through a megaphone yesterday “we should meet or beat our crop expectations.” Adam, pictured below in the photo, is standing in front of a large field of our trees in Artois.

To bring you up to date, we own more than 5,000 acres of olive trees at our three ranches in northern California. We cultivate another 5,000 acres through the growers we work with under contract. All told, we have a bit more than 6 million trees under cultivation on some 10,000 acres.

After Adam’s talk, I walked our group through the adjacent mill, one of two we operate. People clearly were fascinated as they watched the green olives get transported up a conveyor belt and then sent through a powerful blower that removes the leaves and branches. The olives also get washed.

As I explained yesterday, the olives are then crushed and put into what are called malaxation tanks. They have large spiral paddles which turn slowly and separate the oil droplets from the fruit particles. The olive paste is sent to high-speed centrifuges to further separate the oil from any solid particles and water.

Finally, as I explained, the olive oil is pumped into temporary storage tanks before it’s trucked to our nearby facilities in Oroville for longer storage. We don’t filter our oil. Instead, the oil settles for a few months to allow Mother Nature to suck any remaining fruit particles to the bottom of the storage tanks.

It was great to hear our guests comment about the milling operations. People said they loved the fresh olive smell wafting through the mill. One wag joked we should bottle the smell.

An interesting idea – but not one ready for prime time. Instead, I think we’ll stay focused on harvesting our olives and bottling our extra virgin olive oil.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

I got into Sacramento early this afternoon to attend our annual Harvest Retreat. It’s a big event. We take a large group of chefs and wholesalers on a tour to see firsthand how we harvest and crush the olives into olive oil at one of our northern California mills.

The weather in Sacramento is pleasantly mild. After I arrived, one of the first things I did was park myself at a table at the Grange Restaurant & Bar, a great farm-to-table restaurant at the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento. I met a few colleagues and went over the events of the next two days, which I’ll be writing about in coming blogs.

I also got a chance to say hi to Grange chef Michael Tuohy, who was busy preparing a special menu for our group of about 100. The menu features our California Olive Ranch extra virgin olive oils in every course — from the olive oil marinated goat cheese to the Alaskan halibut crudo and orange-almond olive oil cake. The cake is topped with a crème anglaise made from our Miller’s Blend EVOO.

Chef Tuohy was clearly pumped about tonight’s olive oil meal. “It’s one of my favorite ingredients to work with,” he said.

He also kindly offered to take us on a tour of his kitchen a little later in the afternoon.

When we caught up with him there, Chef Tuohy was chopping a beautiful pile of fresh lavender for our meal. He next mixed it in a big mixing bowl with our Arbequina EVOO and some fig balsamic vinegar. Chef Tuohy then proceeded to slather the mixture on several beautiful, locally sourced racks of lamb.

“It’s going to permeate, especially during the cooking and after it’s cooked,” he said of the lavender, olive oil, vinegar combination.

Chef Tuohy also showed us the crème anglaise he’d prepared for the olive oil cake. There’s funny story behind the crème anglaise. It started off as an olive oil ice cream made from our Miller’s Blend. But that was before the guest list for the dinner mushroomed to some 100 people from 40.

Chef Tuohy realized he didn’t have an ice cream maker big enough for that many people. So he did some quick improvisation. He’d make the olive oil ice cream recipe, but not freeze the mixture. And the result: a delicious olive oil crème anglaise.

“It works as a sauce,” he explained. “Sometimes you just have to adjust.”

It’s now hours later. I’ve had a chance to enjoy Chef Tuohy’s dinner. It was exquisite. I now plan to catch a little shut-eye before Tuesday’s events.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

I’m finally ready to report on a brand new product my colleagues and I at California Olive Ranch have been working hard on for months.

We’ve just rolled out a new extra virgin olive oil we call Everyday California Fresh. It’s the country’s first domestically produced, fresh, high-quality EVOO available in sufficient quantities for the U.S. market – and at mass-market prices.

The oil is fresher than mass-produced oils imported into the United States from abroad. When you open the bottle and inhale the olive aroma, I’m betting you’ll agree.

What makes our oil smell and taste like the olives have just been picked?

First, the olives are grown and pressed in California. I tell people our oil doesn’t sit on a cargo ship for several weeks, traveling across the ocean.

And, as I just told someone: If you live in the United States, you can hop on a plane and take a two or three hour flight to visit our olive ranches and mills. They’re located in northern California. No need to buy an overseas plane ticket.

Second, to ensure the oil’s freshness, our employees get the olives from tree to mill quickly.

How?

We plant our trees using a system known as “super high-density planting.” It allows us to grow the trees in hedge rows of 570 to 670 trees per acre, versus traditional plantings of 100 to 150 per acre. That way, employees driving our harvesting machines can harvest the trees more rapidly – and deliver the olives within hours to our mills, where they’re crushed into EVOO.

It’s this speed which prevents the olive from decomposing before we extract the oil. And the result is a great quality oil.

Here’s another thing you’ll notice about Everyday California Fresh. Each bottle shows when the olives were harvested. We harvest our olives in the fall. So the bottle I’m holding shows a harvest date – stamped on the back – of November 2008. Olive oil typically is best when consumed within two years.

Like our other EVOO, the California Olive Oil Council has certified Everyday California Fresh as extra virgin olive oil. True extra virgin olive oil can’t have any flavor “defects” – moldy olives, for example, can make the oil musty.

The flavor profile delivers a distinct fruity nose, grassy and floral notes, and a smooth and buttery tongue. There’s absolutely no bitterness. You’ll also notice a slight peppery finish in your throat and no greasy aftertaste like you’d get from lower quality imports.

Everyday California Fresh is a blend of the three olive varietals we grow in northern California: Arbequina, Arbosana and Koroneiki.

Thanks to a documenting system we use to manage our products’ “traceability,” we can locate the grove of trees on our ranches that have supplied the olives for each bottle of EVOO we produce. No overseas, national olive oil brand can make that claim.

One final note: You’ll notice Everyday California Fresh comes in a new green bottle. The dark green glass prevents light and oxygen from damaging the oil, keeping it fresher longer.

We plan initially to sell Everyday California Fresh at stores in northern California. Our recommended sticker price: $8.99 for a 500 ml bottle, and $11.99 for a 750 ml bottle.

But you don’t have to live in California to try the oil. Anybody can buy it through our online store.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

I’m dashing off a quick heads-up to alert you to a new Internet venture for all things olive oil.

The friendly folks at The Olive Oil Source today launched a new online store targeting olive oil industry professionals – including growers, millers and retailers. It’s the first phase of a total overhaul of The Olive Oil Source web site.

The store sells bulk quantities of extra virgin olive oils, vinegars, milling and testing equipment, and bottling and labeling devices. Containers and accessories for small to medium-sized growers are available, too.

The main Olive Oil Source web site continues to provide loads of information about the olive oil industry – ranging from the ins and outs of starting an olive oil business to details about olive varietals. There’s also a directory of U.S. olive oil companies.

The business was born in the 1990’s. Owners John and Lisa Deane nurtured the site into a clearinghouse of information about olive growing and oil production over the years.

Olive oil producers Shawn and Antoinette Addison bought the business in 2008. Their goal: expand the site with a wider variety of products: offer a more streamlined purchasing system; and make the growing library of information easier to navigate.

“Creating an expanded online store – something completely customer friendly – was first and foremost our goal, and the technology exists now to do just that,” said Antoinette Addison, the company’s vice president of business operations.

The Addisons plan to complete the web site’s overhaul by the end of 2009. They said later changes will include improvements to the existing library of information as well as retail products targeting consumers.

We wish the Addisons all the best with their new venture.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch