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The National Geographic Society played host to a tasty lecture at its Grosvenor Auditorium this week, hosting New York’s Fairway Markets guru Steven Jenkins for an olive oil tasting and wine pairing, with wines chosen by Best Cellars sommelier Joshua Wesson. Jenkins began his career in the gourmet food business by collecting an encyclopedic knowledge of cheese, publishing the Cheese Primer in 1994. His most recent book, The Food Life, takes a similar approach to a wide range of ingredients. He took a few minutes this week to explain his olive oil obsession, and to give DCist the rundown on the basics of good olive oil.
You have already made a name for yourself, and for Fairway Markets, through your knowledge of cheeses. How did this lead into a focus on olive oil?
Fairway Markets have always been the name in fine produce, and the biggest part of produce is salad—even more than fruit— and salads have to be dressed with the best sauce that you can possibly muster. It’s always been my feeling that olive oil is the base that I want my family and all my customers to be endeared to, rather than using butter or lard. Olive oil has been a basis for all of the good times that I’ve had in my career and the foodstuffs that are closest to olive oil are where I’ve had my whole career—the Mediterranean basin. The result is, when I had pretty much mastered and conquered cheese by the late '80s, I really began to concentrate on what I did with olive oil. I made sure that I knew everything about olive and olive oil. I focused on turning myself into an idiot savant, going to every place that knows anything about olives and olive oil.
Nobody in the industry had that knowledge. Everyone was totally ignorant about it, so it made it very easy to take it to the Nth degree. I wanted to make sure that anybody that walks in the store, purchases the very best olive oil for their money, because nine of 10 olive oils are not worth the person buying them. I’ve spent a lot more time deriding and heaping scorn on cheese not worthy of people, now I do the same with olive oil. It’s something that’s sold in virtually every store across the country and that oil is mostly not worthy of the person buying it.
Now I don’t just import the olive oil, I have established relationships with the families, the farmers that produce the olive oil. Now they’ll give the oil to me in barrels, which means several things. First of all, it’s fresher, and second of all, it’s from a specific source; it's made from olives in a highly specified region that I know. We’re really proud of it.
Are you finding that the general public is still somewhat nonchalant about their olive oil? Or is olive oil following in the footsteps of cheese and produce and other products, where a focus on organic and small producers is more prevalent?
Within the past few years, suddenly people are really interested. They had their eyes wide open, and wanted to talk to somebody, to separate all the nonsense. People are not content to have so-called extra virgin olive oil anymore. They’re interested in learning where the best ones come from. I tell them, that just like cheese, it has to do with specific regions. Cheese has nothing to do with the country it’s from, it’s the specific regionality. People want this information, so they can make these learned judgments. They want to know the truth from somebody that has learned it, and it’s just wonderful.
So what are the basics as far as olive oil—what are the different ones to have and when should you use them?
I always say you should have at least three oils in the house, a big one, full of flavor, a really gentle, sophisticated one, and one to cook with. As for the gentle oil, that’s for when there’s things that I want to enhance without overwhelming them. You can strive to have an oil from an olive like the arbequina, which grows not just in Catalonia, but also in western Spain. It’s very smooth, suave and sweet, and when you apply it, it’s unassuming, very aromatic, with some citrus, and a sort of floral thing. It’s going to anoint your dish, and gently describe the other flavors in the dish to each other.
For the big one, it should be robust, with an incipient bitterness to it, probably an early harvest, with a great finishing pepperyness. These could come from the Umbrian, Tuscan, or Sicilian olives, for example, or a combination. The third oil is never ever a so-called pure oil. It’s always an extra virgin, but it’s inexpensive enough you can cook with it. You don’t want to pay $20, $30 or $60 for an oil that you cook with, because once you get it above 180 degrees, all the organic properties of a pure oil are going to scorch and burn, and ruin your food anyway. You do want to saute with extra virgin, but not one that’s so pure that you’re wasting it. I refuse to say you want to use the gentle oils with the lusty recipes or that kind of thing. You may want to put a lusty oil with seafood—it’s up to you. There are no rules for that. But it is a fact, you do want to have three oils in your kitchen.
What tips can you give to people who might be shopping in a store without a personal olive oil tour guide?
That’s part of what I hope to do at these tastings, is teach people how to shop, and make sure they understand what to do when they get into the store. First of all you, have to pick up the bottle and not be influenced by the design on its label. It’s the information on the label: when the olives were pressed, where in the country of origin were those olives grown. The third thing is the price. If you’re paying more than $30 for a liter, you’re getting ripped off.
For me, I want everybody buying a bottle of olive oil to have the freshest bottle possible. If the date on the oil is from more than a year ago, by God, put the bottle back. It also depends on the olives—there are 240 different olives used to make olive oil. Some of them will be good for nearly two years. But the arbequina, for example, most definitely should not be more than 8 to 12 months old. The cardinal rule, is that if you’re shopping in the summertime, the oil should be from the prior autumn.
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