Olive Oil: Which means virgin or refined, cold or warm pressed

Whether in a salad, with bread or in a pan – olive oil is an integral part of Mediterranean cuisine. But olive oil is not just olive oil. Native or refined, cold pressed or warm pressed – what do the terms actually mean? Let’s start with Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Here the oil is extracted directly from the olives by purely mechanical processes. The advantage: It is the pure juice of the olive, which is neither heated nor extracted with chemical solvents. The quality class “Extra Virgin” is the pinnacle of olive oil. It contains a particularly large number of healthy vitamins and, above all, a particularly high proportion of unsaturated fatty acids. Completely different: refined oil. Refined olive oils are hot pressed. Solvents such as hexane or light petroleum are also used during pressing. In the last step, the oil is cleaned. During so-called refining, the typical taste of the oil is lost. Although the vitamins do not survive heating, the refined oil has an advantage: it is more heat-resistant than virgin oil when frying or deep-frying. Olive oil without any additional designation is a mixture of virgin and refined oil. Usually, the proportion of the latter predominates, for the simple reason that native oil is more expensive to produce.