THE story behind
Extraction is as important as harvest. We use cold pressed extraction for our premium or organic olive oil.
One of the keys of excellence is choosing the perfect time to harvest the olives by identifying the right level of maturity with a healthy looking, a good size and color of the seed. Then they are placed in plastic crates and are transferred directly to a state of the art olive oil mill approximately within a few hours.
In the olive oil extraction process, it is very important to clean the olives properly in order to guarantee suitable conditions to obtain the best possible product. Introducing clean olives into the process also means the machinery in the extraction line is protected from excessive wear and tear.
Extraction steps
The first step in the oil extraction process is cleaning the olives and removing the stems, leaves, twigs, and other debris left with the olives. The olives should be washed with water to remove pesticides, dirt, etc.
The second step is crushing the olives into a paste. The purpose of crushing is to tear the flesh cells to facilitate the release of the oil from the vacuoles. This step can be done with stone mills, metal tooth grinders, or various kinds of hammermills.
Paste and Malaxing
Paste preparation is one of our critical steps in determining quality of olive oil obtained.
We use crushers of the latest technology which do not increase the temperature during grinding and allow us to crush the olives in different ways depending always on the variety of the harvest.
Next step is malaxing. The olive paste is put into a malaxer which is a trough with spiral mixing blades. The temperature within the malaxer is monitored to ensure that the olive paste is not heated above 27ºC (80.6ºF). Malaxation takes 20-45 minutes.
Ensuring quality is important
The next step consists in separating the oil from the rest of the olive components. This used to be done with presses (hence the now somewhat obsolete terms first press and cold press), but is now done by centrifugation, except in old facilities. Some centrifuges are called three-phase because they separate the oil, the water, and the solids separately. The two-phase centrifuges separate the oil from a wet paste. In most cases, the oil coming out of the first centrifuge is further processed to eliminate any remaining water and solids by a second centrifuge that rotates faster. The oil is then left in tanks or barrels where a final separation, if needed, happens through gravity. This is called racking the oil. Finally the oil can be filtered, if desired.
After the olive oil is produced, we conduct chemical analysis to ensure the ultimate quality.
