Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot Com
Speaker 1: where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, how
Speaker 1: do they make olive oil or where does olive oil
Speaker 1: come from? Most people come into contact with olives in
Speaker 1: one of three ways. There are the olives that go
Speaker 1: on pizzas and into dinner entrees. They either come fresh
Speaker 1: or they come from a can. Second, there are the
Speaker 1: olives with pimientos that go into martinis. And then third
Speaker 1: there's olive oil. Now, in my case, there was a
Speaker 1: fourth way. When I was a kid, I grew up
Speaker 1: in Huntington's Beach, California, which is in southern California near
Speaker 1: l A, and we lived in this little subdivision that
Speaker 1: the developer had planted an olive tree in the front
Speaker 1: yard of every house. So when I was a little kid,
Speaker 1: these olive trees would produce olives every year and we
Speaker 1: would have olive fights with them. So the fourth way
Speaker 1: to experience olives is through olive fights. But ignoring that
Speaker 1: it seems odd, but olives, whether you're having fights with
Speaker 1: them or buying them at the store, have oil in them.
Speaker 1: Not only do the seeds have oil in them, like
Speaker 1: all seeds do. Like sesame seeds and soybeans and corn,
Speaker 1: they all have oil in them. Olive seeds have oil
Speaker 1: in them, but also the fleshy part has olive oil
Speaker 1: and its cells as well. So to make olive oil,
Speaker 1: what you have to do is you have to release
Speaker 1: the oil from the cells of the flesh as well
Speaker 1: as the cells from the seed. Or if you're making
Speaker 1: a really high end boutique olive oil, you take the
Speaker 1: seeds out and you just get the oil from the flesh.
Speaker 1: So the first step in making olive oil is to
Speaker 1: go out to your olive orchard which you've planted somewhere,
Speaker 1: and harvest the olives at just the right time. You
Speaker 1: don't want them to be too unripe or you get
Speaker 1: acid e kind of olive oil, and you don't want
Speaker 1: to be too ripe or you get disgusting olive oil.
Speaker 1: You want them to be just the right level of ripeness.
Speaker 1: You harvest those olives, you could either rake them out
Speaker 1: of the tree, or you can climb up in the
Speaker 1: tree and hit them with your hands or um. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a mechanical shaker like they use on some
Speaker 1: nut trees, though I doubt olive people would be the
Speaker 1: sorts to use mechanical shakers. So you harvest these olives
Speaker 1: by knocking them out of the tree into some cloths
Speaker 1: that you've spread on the ground. Then you wash the
Speaker 1: olives and separate out as many of the leaves as
Speaker 1: you can, and now it's time to crush them. So
Speaker 1: the old fashioned way to crush them is to take
Speaker 1: giant granite wheels. So think about the wheel on your car.
Speaker 1: It's on an axle. There's the wheel and the rubber
Speaker 1: is hitting the road. Well, imagine making that wheel out
Speaker 1: of granite. But now imagine making it immense, say four
Speaker 1: or five feet in diameter, so it weighs about a
Speaker 1: thousand pounds, and you put it on an axle with
Speaker 1: another big granite wheel on the other side, and you
Speaker 1: spin them in a tub that you've filled with your
Speaker 1: olives that you want to crush. So you're going to
Speaker 1: drive over these olives with your giant, thousand pound granite
Speaker 1: wheels for about a half an hour and you're gonna
Speaker 1: mash that set of olives up into a paste. Now
Speaker 1: that's one way to do it. The other way to
Speaker 1: do it is with some kind of mechanical shredder kind
Speaker 1: of thing that uses blades to finally chop up the olives.
Speaker 1: But either way, what you're getting is this paste that
Speaker 1: consists of the olive flesh as well as the olive seeds,
Speaker 1: all ground up and finally minced. You take that and
Speaker 1: you need to let it sit for about an hour.
Speaker 1: So let me pause for a second here. As I'm
Speaker 1: recording this, there's someone listening in the background and a
Speaker 1: question has come in. The question is what does an
Speaker 1: olive seed look like? Because usually when you get olives,
Speaker 1: the seeds have been removed. Now, if you have olive
Speaker 1: fights with all of these little kids, you see the
Speaker 1: seeds all the time. That's the best part. So this
Speaker 1: seed is sort of like a miniaturized peach pit. It's
Speaker 1: very hard, like a peach pit is, and it's just
Speaker 1: one of them at the center of the olive. And
Speaker 1: to make an olive with pimentos, a push that seed
Speaker 1: out and put a pimento in its place, and that's
Speaker 1: why you never see the seeds anyway. So now you're
Speaker 1: paste has been sitting for a half hour or an hour,
Speaker 1: and the oil has had a chance to kind of
Speaker 1: separate out and develop and it's time to extract the oil.
Speaker 1: You do that in one of two ways. The old
Speaker 1: fashioned way is to put the paste in a press
Speaker 1: and to apply a lot of pressure hydraulic ly to
Speaker 1: force the oil out, and you have your olive oil.
Speaker 1: The more modern way is to put the whole blob
Speaker 1: of paste and a little water into a centrifuge and
Speaker 1: spin it up and it separates, so you get this
Speaker 1: seedy kind of stuff on the outside of the centrifuge,
Speaker 1: then the fleshy kind of stuff, the water based stuff
Speaker 1: in the middle, and then in the center of the
Speaker 1: centrifuge you get the oil because it's the lightest thing
Speaker 1: in that package. And presto, you have olive oil. It's
Speaker 1: ready to be put in a bottle or a can
Speaker 1: or wherever it's gonna get put so it can be
Speaker 1: shipped to you. Now, when you go to buy olive
Speaker 1: oil at the grocery store, you've seen these designations. There's
Speaker 1: virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, and olive oil,
Speaker 1: olive oil and refined olive oil. What's the difference between
Speaker 1: all these different kinds. Well, the difference between virgin and
Speaker 1: extra virgin has to do with acidity. So both of
Speaker 1: these things have been processed using the process we just
Speaker 1: discussed where you crush the olives. You don't heat them
Speaker 1: up to a high temperature, you don't use any chemicals
Speaker 1: for oil extraction. You just crush them, you let them sit,
Speaker 1: then you press or centrifuge the oil out of it.
Speaker 1: Either way you're gonna get virgin or extra virgin olive oil,
Speaker 1: but the differences based on the acidity. The lowest acidity
Speaker 1: gets called extra virgin olive oil. If it's higher acidity,
Speaker 1: it's virgin olive oil. If it has too high of acidity,
Speaker 1: you can't call it either, and you have to do
Speaker 1: something else with it. And in that case you might
Speaker 1: send it through some kind of process or blending to
Speaker 1: try to bring down that acidity level. And then there's
Speaker 1: also what you can do after the facts. So with
Speaker 1: that paste you have left over, there's still some oil
Speaker 1: left in it, you might try to extract olive oil
Speaker 1: from that using heat or chemicals, and then that's just
Speaker 1: plain old olive oil or refined olive oil, probably not
Speaker 1: used for cooking, but used for something else. Now, having
Speaker 1: learned all about olive oil, I will tell you one
Speaker 1: thing that kind of disappoints me. And that's the fact
Speaker 1: that in this subdivision there were hundreds of houses, which
Speaker 1: meant hundreds of olive trees and thousands of pounds of olives.
Speaker 1: In all likelihood, if we had been really industrious as children,
Speaker 1: we could have collected up all those olives and started
Speaker 1: our own olive oil press. But I guess, for one thing,
Speaker 1: people in America maybe weren't so interested in olive oil
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. In second we weren't quite
Speaker 1: that industrious. So until next time. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does that how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com and don't forget to check out the brain
Speaker 1: stuff blog on the house stuff Works dot com home page.
Speaker 1: You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter
Speaker 1: at brain stuff hs W. The house Stuff Works iPhone
Speaker 1: app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.