Olive Oil Lesson of the Week #3

Olive oil expiration dates are pretty irrelevant.

If you’ve ever put olive oil on display on a hot summer day, you may notice the flavor becomes a bit funky after sitting in the sun for quite some time. It’s not a coincidence.

Olive Oil is very sensitive to both light and heat.

Even though Olive Oil won’t typically sit in the sun when in storage, slight differences in temperature over LONG periods of time will IMPACT how fast the flavor becomes funky. More light and heat exposure make the Olive Oil go bad faster

Why else would every bottle say store in a cool, dry place?

I will add “Dark” to that statement though most olive oil bottles are already dark in order to prevent light from oxidizing it.

The funny thing is most the oils are already super oxidized by the time you buy it…

Side Note: Cool, Dry Place does not mean refrigerator. I’d recommend storing the oil like you’d store your wine.

Best Practice

Instead of checking expiration date, look for information on the harvest date — the date at which the olive oil is pressed. Oils without any information on harvest are usually bad.

The harvest date represents when the olives were picked off the trees. When olive oil is made, fresh olives must be used. Way different than table olives that may have been off the tree for years before consumed.

The point of time those olives come off the tree is correlated with the quality of the oil. As an olive ripens, more oil can be squeezed from the olive, at the expense of the quality. So for best quality, look for Early Harvest olives that come off the tree in the beginning of the season. These olives are less ripe but filled with MORE antioxidants and are higher quality than olives from the same tree 40 days later.

Final Thoughts

There is no real standard that is used across the industry for expiration dates. Often brands use 2 years from the date of bottling for expiration. But this doesn’t make much sense since the bottling date may happen 2 years after the oil gets pressed from the olive.

Please note, bottling just means the oil gets transferred from the storage tank into the bottle.

Also, higher quality oils that have more antioxidants take a longer time than low antioxidant olive oil to age.

Why?

Antioxidants block oxidation - so oils without antioxidants will oxidize (or age) much faster.

As always please comment any questions about this article or about olive oil in general.

If you think this article was useful for you, please share with a friend or on social media!

I’ll drop another lesson next week.

-Jack (@extravirginguy)