Olive Oil Tastetacular, Tasted on December 3, 2006 — While nobody but me liked the name (too close to "testicular" apparently), everyone liked the idea of a blind olive oil tasting. My recent trip to the olive rich region of Puglia, Italy, resulted in an embarassment of olive oil riches, and we needed to take advantage of the situation. We all convened at our house one afternoon and got to tasting.

I've loved olive oil for years and years but I admit that even after my trip to Italy I felt my palate was woefully underdeveloped in terms of evaluating quality oil. I hoped to slowly expand my expertise with this event.

The principles of the tasting were as follows:

• blind tasting

• diversity of regions represented

• at least some of the bottles had to be available for purchase by the average consumer (we tested this by shopping in Seattle markets)

• instead of only tasting oil with bread we were going to have a selection of olive oil friendly foods to taste with

• we would try and find oils that stood on their own as primary elements in a dish as well as find oils that were complementary "finishing" oils

I think we did pretty well when it comes to a variety of foods. The platforms on which olive oil could be tested and (of course) tasted included:

• baguettes

• regional pasta from Puglia (with parmesan, truffle salt, and sea salt for additional seasoning)

• vegetable salad

• white bean dip (this came out quite good even though I used canned beans)

Everyone tried to sample each oil in multiple combinations with the various foodstuffs. Below are various tasting notes on each oil from the testers. I've also noted which oils we paid for and which we got as free samples.

I went into this with the assumption that the most flavorful oils would come out of the middle east and the best finishing oils would come from Italy. I know you're not supposed to bring your culinary baggage to a tasting, but I figure disclosure is best. And while the results were somewhat consistent with those assumptions there were still some new realizations.

The oils were a lot closer in flavor profile than I realized. It felt like the band of flavor where differences could be found in the oils was a lot narrower than I expected. I had to work harder than I expected to really isolate distinguishing characteristics. But once I zeroed in there definitely were differences.

The oil with the most flavor came from Italy. It was the house oil from Masseria Barbera. In fact, the flavor was so strong that it polarized the tasters with some appreciating its boldness and others feeling it was not good at all.

Ultimately however it was good that we tasted the oils in a variety of contexts as two stood out above the rest in tow different situations. Gli Speciali, Bitonto, Terra di Bari, a DOP oil that we got as a free sample of the region on our trip to Puglia stood above the rest as a finishing oil. It's texture was thicker and sleeker than the others. Its flavor was subtle bringing harmony and wholeness to any dish it joined. I found it amusing as I know some of my fellow travelers didn't have room in their bags and had to leave this oil in Italy. The pasta on which it shown was a local Pugliese pasta from Benedetto Cavalieri. Frankly, it was great. When perfectly cooked it had a tenderness and firmness that coexisted against all logic in some weird lovely high quality pasta vortex.

The winner for standalone oil was the Harrington Trace, Israeli Gold, Manzanilla. As I suspected, a middle eastern oil made it to the top of the stack for flavor. But it still felt somewhat mild relative to the Masseria Barbera oil that had people arguing.

While this is good news for the producers of the two oils that won our little taste test, this is bad news for most people as I'm almost positive that neither of these oils is available at retail here in the pacific northwest, and I couldn't find the oils available for sale online either. The diversity of small production olive oils available on this planet is mind boggling. It's probably not realistic to expect access to even a tenth as many as exist. But it would be nice to be able to get your hands on these as they were quite enjoyable and stood up to some tough competition.

I'm also sure that whatever your favorite olive oil is, it wasn't represented in the tiny fraction that we tasted. So feel free to let your suggestions (and flames) fly in the comments.