Olive Oil Taste Test at 4 Price Ranges (Low to Expensive)

The varieties of olive oil available are ENDLESS, we’re looking at the different types of olive oil, how they’re made and where to use them!

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– Hello everyone. Today, two normals taste testing different olive oils, and we’re gonna put them to good use too. Boys, ready? – More than. – Yes. – So you’ve got two cloches in front of you. A has some olive oil, B has an application for it. It should help our conversation.

Over to you. – Oh, we have our own shot glasses. – So we’re gonna use this first one as a baseline just to talk about olive oil, tasting notes, how to taste it, all that kind of stuff, and then we’ll move from there.

– I feel like we’ve had a lot of olive oil in the past, haven’t we? – We’ve been told off a lot for sipping olive oil outta shot glasses. – Smells lemony. Clean, fruity olive oil. – Very smooth. No peppery kick– – No. – Which I would sometimes expect from olive oil.

– Interesting. Now, do it again, but have a little sip, keep it in your mouth for a little while because you want to bring the oil up to the right temperature, and then take a little bit of air in across your tongue. At which point, you should get slightly different opened up flavors

And then breathe out. – When do I swallow? – You don’t necessarily need to swallow it. You can spit it if you like. – Okay. I just got confused. Okay. – Let it warm up a little bit. Allow those aromats to come out, then do exactly that, and then breathe back out.

Because what you want is your rectal nasal– – Is that the right word? – Pardon? – Sorry. – (indistinct). – Retro. – Ah, there we go. – Your retronasal. Don’t put your nose there. – And breathe out. – Because what you want is your retronasal,

Which is where you’ll get even more notes in theory. Bearing in mind, this is an extra virgin olive oil, it is Italian, it is unfiltered, which is why it can have a slight cloudy appearance. – It opens the flavors up. – You’re right. Opens things up. – It opens it up more,

So I’m getting more of what I was getting before. I’m not getting different flavors. – I’m getting a little bit of… It’s a bit more herby now. Almost like thymey. Lemon and thyme is where it’s taking me. – Cloche number two is a simple application that this olive oil suggests.

No surprises, what you got. – Oh! – Beautiful. – Yes. – So the thing with extra virgin olive oils, quite often a finishing oil, what we’ve given you is some sourdough which has already been brushed with this same oil and then grilled, a sorrel, chive, and watercress paste, burrata, and some brined tomatoes.

– Lovely. – That’s the olive oil in question. – Cold extraction and unfiltered blend of olive oils of European Union origin. – Castello. Lovely. – Without the olive oil, it’s not flat, but the olive oil lifts everything else that is there. It’s kind of that complimentary angle.

It makes the other flavors come out more. – It turns a very nice dish into a treat. From a texture point of view, you’ve got the oily silkiness. And then from a flavor point of view, it’s the fragrance it brings as well. – So this is an unfiltered version,

So it can be a little cloudy. I think, generally speaking, don’t be fooled by the color because the color isn’t a symbol of quality. The color could also still be fusty, musty, rancid. It could have gone off, so it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily high quality. – Right.

– What was the first word you used? – Fusty. – “Fusty,” he did say that. – I’ve never heard that word before. – Olive oil tasting, there’s lots of lexicon, from herbaceous, and tomato leaf, and citrusy, and fruity. But the negative ones are rancidity, and musty, and fusty, and whiny,

Might be vinegary almost. – They sound like cartoon characters. – They do, don’t they? – Yeah, Fusty, Musty, Rancid– – Rancid and Whiny. – Were we right in the tasting notes of it? Because it feels like it’s still… I’m still getting lemony zest from it.

– I think that citrusy note comes through, quite grassy. They claim quite peppery, whether you’re getting that. I think with all tasting notes, they’re quite subjective. However, once I’ve told you, you’re probably getting it ’cause that’s how tasting notes work. – For the flavor, yes, but not in the sensation.

– Yeah, I know what you mean. – Yeah. – That bottle is from Italy, but it’s the first of our olive oils and comes in at £1.20 per 100 mil, which makes the bottle £12 pounds. – That’s about the same sort of cash I spend on a popular brand

At a supermarket. – Yeah, it’s… For good quality extra virgin olive oil, I know that the scale can go up immensely and quickly, but that feels like a good price for a good quality oil. What a great starting point. – Delicious. I’m gonna finish this

And then we can move on to the next round. – So it’ll disappear into the kitchen– – It feels like as olive oil goes, it is a pretty obvious one. Let’s move on to round two. – [Narrator] If you are enjoying this, there are some small things you can do

That make a big difference to us. Like the video, subscribe if you aren’t, click the notification bell and select all. Thanks. – Right, feel like I’m in the swing of this now. I’ve got a benchmark. – Yeah, yeah, bring it on. – Lift cloche on number two. – Greener.

It’s greener. – Is it? It looks very similar to me. Oh. – Oh, okay. Right, we are… My head is in a lawnmower. – Yes, it’s very grassy. – Okay, oh, and there’s a peppery burn. – There’s… Definitely got a bit more of a burner. I’ve got a tingle on the lips.

– Oh dear, you should go see a doctor. – It’s not any less or more viscous. – There’s more olives in it. – Yeah. – I’m getting more… It feels thicker. – Comparing it to a wine, it feels more full bodied. I think it’s more of a Malbec than a pinot noir.

– I understand what you’re both saying. I think also, and hopefully we’ll see if it’s the case, where the last was a blend of olives from Italy, this is 100% Arbequina olive from Spain. – Oh. This is the one I have at home. And again, I only use it for special occasions,

Like to dress a very delicate salad. – To sip? – No, never to sip. But it’s delicious. – So this is Belazu and this is one of their Spanish varieties. It uses the Arbequina olive and they say you get almost green apple and grape kind of vibes from it.

– I don’t think I’m getting green apple. – Oh no, I… He said it, I’m getting a sweet fruit as a finish. – Last time, you said quite distinctly, “lemony” and “citrusy,” And I think this has a similar acidity but it’s more fruity than a citrus. It moves into green fruit.

You might also, almost in the wine territory, be thinking green apple or even like gooseberry, that kind of sharp, green fruit. – There is a big difference between this and the first one that we tried. They’re very different flavors. – But I wouldn’t go, “Wow, that one is so much better.”

– No. – Just different. – Just different. – Another extra virgin olive oil, also good for finishing dishes, given we are in Spain. Lift the cloch. – Oh! – Look at us. – Not quite, but near enough. This is a Spanish crab rice on courgette. It’s paella rice cooked out

In that same olive oil with a stock that’s got saffron, celery, fennel, onion, garlic in it. And then, it’s finished right at the end with crab meat and then paned. – Beautiful. – They look quite heavy, but actually it’s very delicate. – Yeah. – And it works so beautifully with that.

It’s a good thing that this is slightly more punchy than the last because the flavors here are more complex, but it’s gonna be fighting for the limelight a little bit more. – It needs to keep up with it. – But they’re on the same level. – Yep. – So Belazu actually started,

The two founders were sat next to each other on the first day of school, at secondary school, and they went on to form a business together. Sounds familiar, right? – Silly idea. Silly, silly idea. – And they started as the fresh olive company, sourcing and supplying some of the best olives from Europe

Into restaurants and industry. And then, only more recently, I say that, it’s still a decade old business, Belazu is the consumer brand and it’s more than just olives now and olive oil. It’s all sorts of products, but olives is where they started. It’s where they made their name in the industry

And some of the best restaurants in London went to them for olives. – The best thing about that for me is the pepperiness of the olive oil, ’cause it adds that seasoning touch to it without having actual black pepper on it. – And it feels like when added to other foods,

The fruitiness comes out a bit more as well. – Is it an olive crumb? – It is also a black olive crumb. They are different olives, but it is a black olive crumb. The bottle is perhaps what I would more associate with a premium olive oil because it is opaque.

You can’t see in which means the light can’t get in. It can’t damage the purity of that oil inside when it’s on the shelf. It should still be stored in a cool, dark place. Your pantry, if you have one. – My only problem with finishing things

With olive oil is I end up finishing everything with olive oil. – So it all tastes the same? – A little bit, yeah. I never know what olives oils to use when. – Bear in mind, olives, they are grown all over the world, but we think of them more as a Mediterranean thing,

So, so far, Italy and Spain, and they perfectly lend themselves to that side of cooking, and I do mean cooking as well as finishing. But the extra virgin olive oil quality is often more of a finishing oil. – Well Baz, you already have a bottle of this.

– Yeah, how much did Haley pay for it? – So the last one was £1.20 per 100 milliliters. This is £3.30 per 100 milliliters. So that bottle is £16.50. – I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on an oil before. I’ve probably tapped out at around the £12 for a liter

Of decent quality stuff before. – I prefer olive oil to wine. We are not much of wine drinkers is my house so when I walk down the olive oil section, it’s like walking down the wine section. I look at around the 12 to 20 pounds, going “What am I gonna treat ourselves

“to this month, year probably?” But with wine, until I get to the above 15 pounds, I go, “I won’t taste the difference. “I won’t appreciate it.” – Yeah, right. – I think it’s a wonderful comparison. It’s sense of place with grapes and olives, they’re doing the same thing. This is single varietal,

One type of olive from one particular region. Let’s do round number three. – No Popeye jokes yet either. – No, ’cause they’re really obvious. – Yeah. – Number three. – Glowing. – Lighter. – It’s glowing. – Glowing. – It’s like it’s got more… It’s illuminated, – It’s got more luminosity.

– That’s what I look for in olive oil. Yeah, I mean, you’re right. It’s definitely lighter in color. – Wow, okay. – How do I describe that? – I think I know where this is from. – This is olive oil tasting, not pretentious ingredients.

– What do you mean you know where it’s from? – I think it’s Greek from smelling it. It is still grassy but not as pungent. Yeah, it’s not wet grass, it’s dry grass now. – Retronasal, there it is. – That is… It has a burn but not a peppery one.

– No, it’s more like a chili burn, actually. – Yeah, yeah, yeah. – I’m not getting as much grass and greenness to it. – Currently, I have three olive oils at home: I have a cheap one, I’ve got a posh one, and I’ve got one I bought from a restaurant, a Greek restaurant,

Which tastes exactly like this. That’s why I’m saying it’s a Greek oil, but I dunno what the flavor is. – This is by Nicholas Alziari. It’s his cuvee prestige from 1868. It’s a Frenchman. – That’s definitely… That’s not Greek. – Not Greek – French ov… French olive oil.

– But Barry, it might well have a little bit of Greek in it because what he does is the same as you would do with champagne. Every year, he blends olives from all over Europe to get the exact same flavor profile that he has had forever.

So like a house champagne is always the same, it’s not a vintage, it’s not how it tastes that year, it’s always blended to taste the same, his oil does the same, and it is a secret recipe. And it’s been trapped away for decades, 70 to 100 years.

– I’ve never thought of olive oil being a recipe in itself. – I know, yeah. That’s odd, isn’t it? But I suppose with the blend and with everything else, by being able to control it, you get a more consistent product year after year, and you can buy it knowing

It’ll be the same thing. Whereas if you bought the Spanish olive oil this year, it might taste different to the one that you bought last year. – Precisely. Lift the cloche on B. – Whipped feta? – Some of the finest French cream cheese with crudites. – Why was it going…

It wasn’t going to be feta. – I know, but it would pair well with feta. – Nicholas Alziari says very much, this is just perfect for French bread to dip, or the simplest of salads to finish. So I thought really good quality French cream cheese and some crudites.

– As a dish, we’ve got the simplest yet, which I think allows it to stand out a bit more. It’s probably the… One of the most delicate. – The Spanish one had a lot going on in it. This one is very clean. – Yeah. Clean in flavor but the slight burn works well

With the creaminess of that and the freshness of the veg. – So what you’re buying here is more the recipe and the prestige of that recipe, and the consistency of that this year, last year, 10 years ago. You know what you’re gonna get. – Again, it comes in a tin,

So it keeps the light out. I think what’s interesting here is the extraction. So it’s done slowly, using stone mills over several hours. And then, once all of that olive oil is there, they flush it with cold water. And what happens is the oil rises to the top,

And then that is scooped off and that is stored down. So it has this very unique way of extracting and processing too, using that method. They do praise its aroma. It has a slight bitterness on the finish. We’re talking fresh, grassy aroma, fruity flavor, and a slight pepperiness.

– How much was this? – We’ve gone up again a little bit in price. That tin is £20, which makes it four pounds per 100 milliliters. – I think you’d have to really like that olive oil and know that you want to get that time and time again.

You know exactly where you’re going to use it. Because for me, that doesn’t deliver on all the flavor side of things that you’re getting. It’s not that unique flavor. – Yeah. My association with spending money on these types of things is the more money you spend, the more flavor you get,

But that’s not the case for this. But that’s not what they’re going after. – Trying to do. – No. – No. – I think this leans into the French delicate, subtle perfection of something rather than just massive flavor bomb. This is just consistently perfect year on year. Has been since 18 what?

– 1868. – Just for context, we’ve done cloudy unfiltered, Italian; Single varietal, Spanish; And we’ve done cuvee prestige perfect recipe for 100 years, French. Life the cloche on A. – Greek. – It’s a lot less in the glass. – There’s less in there. – Leads me to believe…

– And it looks the exact same as the last one. We’ve covered so many varieties now, we should be semi-pros now. – Semi something. – What? – What the hell is that? – Ebbers, that’s not olive oil. – That’s appletinis. – That’s apple sours. – Apple sours, I’m getting like…

Are you sure that’s olive oil? – That’s a shot of apple sours. – Have a taste. Same process, little bit. Have a (inhaling) and then a (exhaling). – I was not expecting this, okay. Hello everybody, welcome to the video. It’s number four and we are not eating olive oil. What is that?

– That’s apple oil. – That is cold pressed olive oil. – No, it’s not. – No, it’s cider. It’s got a cider. – But it’s also got a… Almost a sweet… – Yeah. Or no, like figgy. Figgy raisin. – There’s something very specific that you are just missing. – There is, isn’t there?

– But I can’t work out what it is. We’ll get there. We’ll get there, we’ll get there. – This is Oliveology’s cold pressed olive oil, but in the same press at the same time as the olives was apple, cinnamon, sage, lemon and honey. So it is not an infused oil

Where you make olive oil and then you infuse it. In the actual olive press, those ingredients go through as well. – Wow. – It’s like eating an apple pie. Like, it’s the real ingredients that have gone into it rather than– – It’s all in there, yeah.

– I have no idea what I would use this for but for sipping on, it’s lovely. – It’s like Christmas in an olive oil. – Also, to add to the conversation, these are a specific olive. We are talking– – From Greece. – Koroneiki from a single estate. So it’s not an entire region,

It’s a single estate, organic farm in Sparta, in Greece, and that one type of olive. But then through the press, they put those other ingredients. It has won countless awards. It is fairly unique. Lift cloche B. – What are you gonna be? – Sweet. It’s got to be sweet.

– Is it rum baba? Is it? – It is olive oil cake. Little bit of clementine mint and walnut, but it’s also got honey through the sponge. And I just want you to liberally drizzle that wonderful oil over it. We are so used to putting dairy fat into our desserts,

Why not the fat of an olive? Just for context, they describe it as floral with lingering apple tones. First, sweetness of semi ripe olives. Then, apple, honey with a hint of cinnamon, that crescendos on swallowing. Then, the sage kicks in with a slightly nutty finish at the end.

– It does all those things but on the first sniff, you get apple sours. – Yeah. I would love to be a copywriter that could write “crescendos on swallowing.” – Cake and olive oil. I’ve had olive oil cake, but never cake with olive oil. You know what I mean? – Yeah.

– So that, that cake itself has been made with olive oil, but not that one. It’s been made with an extra virgin olive oil. However, the finishing oil should give it a whole nother level. – I never thought you need to finish a cake, but it has a complexity straight away.

But so much richer than just cake. – Yeah. – Lemon drizzle, we’re used to that. We’re used to finishing cakes with sugar syrups. We’re used to finishing cakes with cream cheeses and dairy fats. But why not oils? – That is completely unique and I’ve never had anything like that before.

– I thought I had enough olive oil in my life, but turns out, no. I need more. – Price wise, per 100 milliliters, this is 10 times more expensive than where we started with the Italian unfiltered. This is £12 pounds per 100 milliliters. That bottle is 30 quid. – Wow.

– No denying, it’s delicious. Really exciting. I’m so glad I’ve tried it. – And I’m very glad that we now have a bottle that I can use in the studio to add to things, or it’d be bold to spend 30 pounds of my own money on it

But that’s just because I don’t know of that many uses for it, regardless of how delicious it is. – It’s not until you put it to your nose and tongue that you can have any idea ’cause that reaction on number four was exactly what we were hoping for.

It doesn’t just pair with desserts. They say it also works really nicely with shellfish, monkfish, those kind of flavors. Subtly finishing fish dishes is another interesting avenue to explore. – If I was going for a flavored olive oil, I’d get one of those little sets because that’s the variety you want.

That’s quite a lot of it. Olive oil does go off, doesn’t it? The shelf life isn’t as long as you’d expect. – Store it well, it’s got a pretty good shelf life, but if it starts to go musty, fusty and rancid, then you’ll certainly know about it. – What I found really interesting

About this whole thing is I knew that there were different types of olive oils with different flavors and things, but I’ve never really personally experimented with them. I’m more likely now to buy a decent bottle of olive oil, just one, and I’ll use that,

And then I’ll go buy a different style the next time, and a different style of the time after that. And that’s how I’ll do my experimentation. – For me, it’s the fact that the more money you spend on olive oil doesn’t always equate to more flavor, unless you spend a butt ton.

It’s about how the olive is treated in the pressing, how the olives that are combined, and the overall sensation that olive oil gives you. Either way, I feel like I’ve moved now from semipro, maybe I’m flirting in with professional world of olive oil tasting now, yeah? – And he’s a professional everything. – Over to you, guys. Four different olive oils, what do you think? Comment down below. And if there is another category of things that we should taste side by side, pop that in the comments too. – Beer.