Category Archives: tasting

At Okanagan
Feast of Fields

Amelia Oil at Okanagan Feast of Fields – Sunday August 22 – Brock Farm, Okanagan Falls

We were excited to be part of the Okanagan Feast of Field of Fields event this year. This is the annual fundraiser for Farm Folk City Folk.

http://www.feastoffields.com/

We shared a booth with our friends Cam and Dana, the wonderful chefs who run Joy Road Catering. http://www.joyroadcatering.com/ We were also joined by, Tim from Sweet Pit Heirloom Tomatoes.

Dana’s artisan sourdough bread was grilled on site and topped with Tim’s colourful tomatoes and fresh basil with a liberal drizzle of Amelia Oil.- heaven !

Joy Road Catering, are the people who do the fabulous wine maker’s dinners at God’s Mountain. Dana makes some of the most delicious artisanal loaves of bread you will ever taste and they feature Amelia Oil to dip it in. They have introduced Amelia Oil to many of our good customers.

Feast of Fields features numerous chefs, vintners and local producers, showcasing the best local ingredients.

Their web site says to think of it as a roaming 25 course wine pairing and tasting menu on a gorgeous farm. I can’t imagine a better way to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the Okanagan. It was delicious!

Put this one on the to do list for next year.

 

Heirloom Tomatoes and Amelia Oil

Rebecca and Dana at Feast of Fields

Lemon Tart Loves Amelia Oil

 

We’re so happy the ‘Lemon Tart’ is enjoying her Amelia Oil. Have a look at the Lemon Tart blog to see what she has to say about us.

We always love to hear what yummy things you cook or bake with Amelia Oil. Send us your tasting notes and recipes to ameliaoil(at)telus.net. We would be happy to post a link to your blog.

Live Olive Oil Tasting

Amelia Oil will be participating in a live olive oil tasting on line, which is being organised by Olive Oil Tasters. If you would like to participate please sign up on the Olive Oil Tasters site. This tasting will focus on Italian extra virgin olive oil from last year’s harvest and will include Amelia Oil from Umbria and Farmstead Wine‘s EVOO from Liguria. These are two very different oils and this is an excellent chance to experience the diversity of Italian olive oil.

We are offering a 20% discount to the first 20 participating tasters. Please send us an e-mail to request your olive oil so that you can take part in this event that will take place on Jan. 18th.

Winter Blues

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I guess I have been hibernating a bit lately; these last few days have felt like winter here in Piedmont. Yes, this is my excuse for neglecting this blog. However, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of spring. I am going down to Amelia for Easter and I will have more updates on Francesco and his olive groves. I am still hoping to take the ONAOO olive oil tasting course in May, but I may need to rob a bank first. I still haven’t understood why the course is so expensive. I guess most courses that give you a professional qualification tend to come with a hefty price tag.

We still have some tasty 2007 olive oil as well as fresh 2008 Amelia oil. Check out our web site to place an order. We ship to the States.

Tried, tested and true

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A colleague of mine at UniSG has a friend who works at the Stazione Sperimentale Oli e Grassi (Experimental Lab for Oils and Fats) in Milan. We decided to send a sample of 2008 Amelia Oil off to Milan to see the exact chemical makeup of this year’s oil. The results came back and our oil has passed the test with flying colours.

For an olive oil to be considered extra virgin, it must have less than 0.8% acidity. We are proud to announce that Amelia Oil only has 0.2% (well below the average) this year. Our oil was also tasted by two expert olive oil sommeliers who declared it to have notes of fresh fruit and almonds with no defects (such as rancidity, mold, metallic taste, etc).

With science standing behind us, we can soundly say that Amelia Oil is truly extra virgin olive oil of very high quality.

If you would like to see the actual test results, click here

Amelia Oil at Silvia Dotto’s for the Culture Crawl

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Rebecca was at Silvia Dotto’s studio for the East Side Culture Crawl this weekend. She served 2007 Amelia Oil from Silvia’s beautiful pottery dishes and both were a hit. If anyone would like to get their hands on Silvia’s ceramics, now is the time. In the future, Silvia will be focusing her efforts on her art pieces and ventures in Italian food; therefore, she is retiring her line of serving dishes. The image above is Silvia’s olive bowl. Keep your eyes on Silvia’s web site to see what she will be up to next…

Amelia Oil at Eataly

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Yesterday I took a group of UNISG students to Eataly in Turin. I really wanted to share the taste of fresh oil with them so I organised a tasting after our tour. I am pleased to report that they gave Amelia Oil a glowing review (I am still waiting for their tasting notes!). It means a lot to me because these are young gastronomers in training and they have tasted some fine products from all over the world.

Although Amelia Oil is not yet available at Eataly. You can buy it straight from Francesco if you are in Italy or on-line from us if you are in North America.

The inedible olive

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I had passed the olive tree by the house many times that day. Its leaves were a shimmery silver like an exotic party dress waving to the rhythm of the warm Mistral wind on that sunny autumn day. I stopped to touch a branch, running its leaves through my dry fingers. I came across a soft, firm little fruit and, before I knew what had happened, there was a cold hard olive lying in my hand. The black fruit became glossy as a rolled around between my fingers. Its firm flesh had ripe give when I pressed it. I knew nothing about olive trees and their mystery got the best of me: I popped the exotic fruit into my mouth and bit down. BLEHHHHH! Bitter mouth contorting awfulness. I spit several times on the ground and went looking for water.

The raw olive is inedible, despite its seductive looks. In her fascinating book, Much Depends on Dinner (1986), Margaret Visser tells us that raw olives contain a bitter substance called oleuropein, which is separated in the production process for making oil. It is siphoned off with the vegetable water. Apparently this byproduct is quite difficult to dispose of and can become a dangerous pollutant. In Roman times, it was called amurca and it was used as a weed-killer and insecticide.

When I go down to Amelia next week, I plan to avoid eating the raw olives but I will investigate what happens to this bitter byproduct. It would be interesting to see if it is being put to some use and maybe there is a potential to do so in the future.