How to make extra virgin olive oil
Extra virgin olive oil is made from first milling of the
fruit and by extracting the oil while maintaining a temperature less than 27°C
through strictly mechanical means.
Here’s a quick step by step of the production process :
1- Harvest
The first step in producing high-quality extra virgin olive
oil is harvesting the fruit, this step
is crucial because it’s one of the important factors of premium quality vs
regular quality.
In Tunisia, harvest season starts in october and ends in
february. A day picking fruit begins at sunrise, and lasts until 16 :00,
there are few options that we use in tunisia such as, electric harvester, tree
rake and a stick
2-Transport of the fruit
Olives are heavy and transporting them to the mill
can be really challenging. Local farmers usually use bags of 60kg each or
crates of 20kg, load them into the back of their pickups and drive them slowly
to the mill.
3-Milling
this step is the most important step of the entire process, it’s where we find out how much oil we’ve actually made. Since olives are usually picked during the day, the line at the mill at night can last for hours.
So let’s go and find out the steps of milling :
-Crushing
the olives are washed with water to remove debris and any leftover leaves, then they pass directly to the crusher ( including the pits) and they get transofrmed into paste.
- Malaxing
The paste finally arrive in the malaxer which look like a horizontal cylindrical arm moves around and around for about 20-35min.
- The centrifuge(Decanter)
After the period of malaxing the paste is pumped to the centrifuge (first in first out ) : the centrifuge is machine that separates vegetable water and solids from olive oil.
- Separator
after the centrifuge the oil is pumped to the separaor to eliminate the remaining traces of water.
