The Harvest Retreat is a huge event for us each fall. Early Tuesday morning, my colleagues and I will climb into a bus along with a big group of chefs and wholesalers. We’ll head north up the interstate about a hundred miles to the town of Artois. There, we’ll give our guests a firsthand tour of how we harvest and crush olives into extra virgin olive oil at our mill. Later, we’ll hold an EVOO tasting led by a trained taster. And we’ll eat great food, all featuring EVOO.

The culinary events actually began Monday evening at Sacramento’s Citizen Hotel, where my friend Michael Tuohy heads the kitchen at Grange. The eatery’s mantra is serving fresh local, seasonal food.

Three of my colleagues and I were catching up on some last minute business at the Grange Monday afternoon when Chef Tuohy came to say hello, holding a cup of espresso. He was preparing for the evening’s festivities and agreed to give us a look inside the kitchen.

We immediately asked what’s it’s like cooking a big dinner for other chefs?

“Are there chefs here?” he deadpanned … before cracking a smile. “I don’t even think about it.”

Inside the kitchen, staff members were chopping oregano and parsley, preparing the halibut crudo for the evening’s dinner, checking the rack of lamb, and washing up.

Tonight’s menu, in fact,  will feature our EVOO in every course: From the locally sourced olive oil-marinated goat cheese being served as an appetizer, on through the first course of roasted butternut squash soup and the main course of rack of lamb with EVOO-crushed potatoes. Dessert will bring orange-almond olive oil cake.

This evening’s dinner, for some 65 guests, wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. “We’ve got some logistical challenges,” Chef Tuohy explained. The dinner was being held in a large room seven floors up from the kitchen. Much of the preparation would have to be done with transportation issues in mind.

For example, Chef Tuohy already had seared the lamb rack — which, by the way, was raised just 20 minutes south of here. He planned to cook the racks more fully right before serving. “We’ll cook them to 135 degrees F. down here and bring them up in a hot box,” he said.

The halibut crudo, meanwhile, would be finished upstairs at the dinner.

Hours later, now that I’m back in my room, I can tell you the logistics weren’t a problem. The food was great. The conversation was great. Now it’s time to hit the hay.

Bon appétit,

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

Bob — shown here wearing a hard hat during construction work at one of our mills — is in charge of crushing our olives and turning the oil into world-class extra virgin olive oil. He’s a veteran of California’s EVOO industry.

At 63, he’s a big, burly, genial man. He’s been working for local olive-oil producers for a quarter century, long before American consumers were aware of the quality EVOO being produced in California.

“When you make as many gallons of olive oil as I do, it’s in your blood,” says Bob, who was born in Corning, Calif. His grandfather and uncle were board members of the California Olive Grower Protection League in the 1930s.

Bob starts his day at 7 am. Here’s what he does.

Once the harvest begins Bob keep tabs on every step of the olive-crushing process at our two northern California mills.  Next, Bob monitors the oil while it settles in tanks for two to three months. The settlement process allows Mother Nature to naturally decant any remaining fruit particles to the bottom.

Bob moves the oil from tank to tank about every month to remove the sediment and clean the tank. The process, called racking, typically is done in late January, which allows our new oil to ship by Feb. 1st or so.

Bob also blends and tastes the oils that make up our lineup of EVOOs. And he produces specialized blends for certain chef and food-service customers.

Come this November, Bob will begin choosing the oils we use to make our freshest EVOO, Limited Reserve. (We previously called the oil Olio Nuovo.) We bottle Limited Reserve immediately after we press the olives, rather than put the oil in settlement tanks. Limited Reserve must be consumed sooner than our other EVOOs, before those flavorful fruit particles in the bottle ferment.

To make Limited Reserve, Bob personally tastes each batch of oil produced from every one of our northern California olive groves.

He records the quality of each batch. After he’s tasted all the oil, Bob selects the best four or five and brings samples to a conference room at headquarters in Oroville.

There, about a half dozen of us sit around a table and taste the oils, and choose the best which will be designated Limited Reserve.

Bob got his start as a miller in the 1980s at Stonehouse California Olive Oil, which today sells its oil in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

That first year was a very different time for the California EVOO business.

“We made 26,000 gallons of extra virgin olive oil,” Bob recalls. “But we literally had no market to sell it. We were way ahead of the curve. The frustration was we had a great product.”

The big challenge in those days: “Trying to understand what the American consumers wanted,” Bob says.

Bob eventually took ownership of Stonehouse and later sold it to another olive oil company. Bob continued to make EVOO for other companies before joining California Olive Ranch about five years ago.

He’s had a front-row seat watching the huge transformation in California’s olive oil business: “I think we’re getting there. The news media has gotten on board. The chefs have gotten on board. And American consumers love California extra virgin olive oil.”

Bon appétit,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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