rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Halloumi stir-fried with harissa
Pumpkin flowers stuffed with sheep’s ricotta
Strawberry pannacotta with balsamic
Spaghetti with lemon and parmesan cheese
Oven-baked perch with potatoes, olives and mandarin olive oil
Antipasti: Meat, cheese and bruschetta
Spaghetti with anchovies, olives and capers
Secondo piatto: Breaded veal cutlets
Contorno: Potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary
Spiralini with ricotta and tomatoes
Spaghetti for hungry footballers
Ingredients for olive oil tasting
Bread – white
Representing
Africa
Mustapha’s Moroccan Extra Virgin Olive Oil
California
B.R. Cohn Sonora Gold
Italy
Badia a Coltibuono Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Chianti
Spain
Núñez de Prado Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Andalusia
Pour each oil into a white saucer, so you can get a good look at the colour and viscosity. Cut the bread into small cubes. Dip in oil and eat. Simple.
Word on the street is that the bread can modify the flavour and mask the subtleties of the oil, so, for purists, dispense with the bread and instead pour some oil on a teaspoon, suck it into the mouth with a slurp and wait for it to flow down the back of the throat.
Ingredients for cold infusions
Rosemary – a big sprig
Dried chilli – one large one or several small
Black peppercorns – a small handful
Garlic – a whole bulb
We’ve worked out two ways to infuse the oil. The first is what we call warm infusion, where we gently heat the flavourings in a saucepan of oil for maybe an hour. Then there is cold infusion, where we leave the flavouring in the olive oil for a couple of weeks – the flavour slowly ebbs out in a more natural way. Things like lemon rind or basil, which contain water, go mouldy if you cold infuse them. But on the other hand, when we heat up the oil the result is a bit bland because the volatile aromatic flavour compounds are destroyed.
Our success stories so far have been cold-infused dried chillies, rosemary and roasted garlic (we nuke the dastardly bacteria with a good roasting).
Get creative and mix up whatever ingredients take your fancy. You will need a variety of glass bottles, corks and funnels. You are best off sterilizing the bottles beforehand – 10 minutes in boiled water will do the job.
Simply put your flavourings into a bottle and then fill with olive oil so that they are covered and there are no air bubbles.
To roast the garlic, preheat the oven to 190o C / gas mark 5, wrap the whole, unpeeled bulb tightly in kitchen foil and roast for about 40 minutes or until the cloves are soft. Once the bulb is cooled down a bit, pull off individual cloves and shove as many of them down the neck of the bottle as you can. Then fill and cover with oil.
Olives stone-ground with lemons
Just when we’d really got the hang of infusing the lemon rind we discovered a lemon olive oil from Olivier’s & Co. which is vastly superior and made in a completely different way. In contrast to an infusion, here the lemons and the olives are crushed together in the olive press. The olives and lemons are ‘joined at the pip’, Cathy likes to say. We’ve taken to drizzling this oil on fish and chicken or as a lazy salad dressing (just add a pinch of salt). But best of all we use it to make lemon mayonnaise (gives a citrusy lift to potato salad, or try dipping grilled asparagus spears
