Olive Oil Tasting

November Selection Vol 2 142
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On Sunday evening last week Viv and Nick came round to join us for the official tasting of this seasons Olive oil. David had arranged a blind tasting of four oils, which we had fun sampling and trying to guess which ones they were. The choices were this years oil, first and second batches, last years oil from Vetralla and a sample from a small bottle that we had been given as a gift from the mill. The latter was actually the most tasteless and I was a little concerned it might have been our Vetralla oil but thankfully it wasn’t. The two pressings of this year’s olive oil were absolutely delicious as we had hoped they would be. The only difference between the two is that the first press, earlier harvest which has had longer to settle by a couple of weeks is also more peppery.

        

We had a very enjoyable evening as David had prepared, with a little help from me a delicious supper. After the oil tasting we had Calabrian cheeses with honey, pear jam (homemade) and walnuts (homegrown), also fennel(Annunciata and Bruno’s), orange and walnut salad as starters. Since living here I have developed a liking for walnuts and I even managed to eat a little fennel as it worked well with the orange flavour.



The next course was roast chicken, roast rosemary potatoes, green beans, carrot and turnip mash with gravy. A flavoursome roast indeed which we simply followed with fresh fruit from the garden in the form of persimmon and kiwi. The persimmon has a strange taste, difficult to describe, a cross between tomatoes and oranges but with a dry aftertaste. Definitely an acquired taste but we all ate at least some and the kiwis were scrumptious and cleared the palate perfectly afterwards!

                        

After supper we played word games around the kitchen table as no sitting room ready to relax in just yet.