Olive oil

Here's a new adventure we've been on that I wanted to share. Last weekend (a week ago now) we went with some friends to a factory where they process olives to make olive oil. It was VERY interesting. Not quite the factory we would see in the states but not a donkey and a stone wheel.

I just wanted to send you a few photos so you can share our experience. Here you see the back of a truck full of olives. The man is scooping the olives into a bin where they are scooped into a tunnel with a conveyor belt brought up to a fan that whooshes the leaves and sticks out.

The two large stone wheels are grinding the olives to a pulp and pushing them into something that spits the pulp out onto palattes. I know you can only see one but there really are two.

There's a guy who directs the mushed olives onto the round palattes and stacks them up about three feet high.

They are then put into a machine that slowly squeezes the oil out. When it comes out, believe it or not, it's green (like the olives) and very strong tasting.

We got five liters and were told to let it sit in the dark for a couple of weeks so the flavors could blend and settle. Of course we couldn't wait and ate some with some bread Bob had made. It was delicious. It had a bit of a bite like it had pepper in it. The bottles are sitting in our back room under a towel. I can hardly wait to see what two weeks bring.