There are more olive trees in Puglia than anywhere else in Italy. In fact, with an estimated 50 million trees growing in the Italian boot's "heel," there's nearly one for every man, woman and child living in the entire nation.
Driving south along the Adriatic Sea, as I did late last fall, I saw acre after glorious acre of Pugliese olive trees, which have gnarled and windblown trunks, making sculptural shapes that are both colossal and somehow ethereal. They're a cloud of silvery, gray-green leaves.
They're also venerable. It's not unusual to see specimens still bearing fruit that are 500 or 1,000 years old; a few are scientifically proven to even predate the birth of Christ. It was a privilege, then, to learn more about these living monuments by visiting groves, seeing olives being harvested and squeezed for their oil, and then savoring its piquant flavor.
Olive oil has been produced in Puglia for centuries, even millenniums, but a remarkable transformation has occurred with this greenish-gold nectar in just the last few decades. What was once viewed as a cheap condiment, something like ketchup, has successfully repositioned itself as a luxury product suitable for chefs who want only the finest cooking ingredients.
"Things are changing," says Nicola Ruggiero, president of Oliveti d'Italia, a trade group that touts olive oil from Puglia and throughout Italy. "Ten years ago, we sent everything we grew to America. Now, we only send the highest quality oils. In Puglia, we're starting to make single cultivars [nonblended oils] and giving more care to how the olives are pressed. We are no longer focused on making the most oil, but the best."
Rocco DiPietro, a partner at Il Scalino, a market on High Street in Baltimore, agrees. "Americans like to go to Tuscany, so they buy Tuscan olive oils even though they are very expensive," he said. "But Puglia's oils are gaining in notoriety. They are high quality, but nicely priced." DiPietro says he is just starting to get in oils from Puglia's 2006 harvest.
A bitter lesson
As it happens, I was in Puglia when these same olives were being picked. On a warm November morning, I arrived in northern Puglia at the village of Andria, which is a landscape of low, rolling hills.
I spent a few hours strolling through the farm of Giancarlo Ceci, whose family has grown olives here for the past eight generations. He said that, like approximately 15 percent of groves in Puglia, his is an organic operation, so he lives in fear of mosca, or flies that bore into olives and destroy the fruit.
While we walked about this scenic spot, I felt strongly seduced by the beauty of olives still on the tree. "In order to understand a land, you have to eat it." Recalling this quote by Italo Calvino, an Italian author who wrote The Name of the Rose, among many other books, I plucked a green olive off a branch and popped it into my mouth.
Immediately, my tongue and throat started to burn, as if I'd swallowed a wad of wasabi. This fiery sensation took several long moments to dissipate.
Ceci smiled at my beginner's mistake. Unlike most fruit, as everyone in this part of the world knows, olives are inedible when consumed directly from a tree. My error was compounded in this case, I soon learned, because olives grown for oil are altogether different from those cultivated for table consumption.
Counterintuitively, oil olives are usually smaller - the shape of a grape, perhaps - while table olives can grow to the size nearly of a walnut. Oil olives ripen longer and develop more sugar than the table varieties. They are harvested in November; table olives get picked the previous August. What's most confusing is that an oil olive's "sugar," a complex molecular structure called oleuropein, tastes exceedingly bitter.
A few days later, I knew better than to eat forbidden fruit when I visited Count Onofrio Spagnoletti Zeuli at his vineyard, also in Andria. Spagnoletti Zeuli guesses he has 40,000 olive trees, all of them pruned into a shape he likens to a chalice: hollowed out at the center, with circumferential branches growing into a "cup." This lets the maximum amount of light filter down through the tree and onto its fruited branches.
Unlike grape production, an enterprise with fairly consistent annual yields, growing olives is more uneven. A tree that produces a bumper crop one year might yield hardly any the next. Thus, as the count and I strolled his elegantly maintained fields, I saw some trees that were bare, while others were laden with clusters of berries ready to fall from the branch.
Traditionally, this was precisely how they were harvested; the olives picked themselves, so to speak, dropping free when they felt like it. Problem was, such ripe fruit was susceptible to bruising and, once squeezed, resulted in an inferior grade of oil. Today, the highest quality extra-virgin olive oil produced in Puglia is made from olives picked by hand.
It is a strangely delicate process. First, a group of a half-dozen or so men carefully spread out a wide sheet of netting on the ground by a trunk - almost as if the tree is a bride, and this gossamer fabric a veil being arranged around her satin slippers.
A couple of workers then climb tall, triangular ladders that lean high into the branches; another pair confine themselves to lower-hanging fruit. They quickly comb each branch with a hand trowel (until quite recently, instead of these plastic tools, pickers threaded goat's horns onto their fingers) and their vigorous downward thrusts send a shower of berries onto the netting below. It's raining olives!
Once the tree is stripped of fruit, the men pick up the net's four corners, hoisting it aloft like fisherman pulling their catch up from the sea. Leaves, twigs and branches in the pile are sorted out later. For now, the only remaining job is to quickly count out 50 olives from the total. This amount then is weighed, tallied and compared to this tree's yield in previous years. One tree done, only 39,999 more to go.
Avoid the sun
There is a strong correlation between early harvesting and the best-quality oil: As the fruit matures, the oleuropein responsible for its sourness increases. Ideally, olives should be picked just as they are "turning" from green to a more violet color.
It's also understood that the fruit should be milled as soon as possible after it is picked, lest fermentation occur and give the oil an acidic taste. Two or three days are acceptable, but it is better still if olives are pressed within 24 hours. Finally, the juice must be kept away from the sun because olive oil is extremely light-sensitive.
Puglia's soft, pumice rock proved much easier to excavate than build anything with, so there are nearly 2,000 underground olive-oil presses (or frantoios) in this region. I stumbled upon one in the charming village of Lecce and was lucky enough to have a local architect named Antonio Monte explain the centuries-old method of making olive oil.
The berries would be carted here from surrounding fields and dumped into a circular trough carved from rock, where they were crushed underneath an enormous millstone. Monte hopped on top of the trough to demonstrate how this millstone was, in turn, pushed by a wooden beam harnessed to a mule who trudged about in a circular path at the trough's perimeter. "The mule was blindfolded, of course. Otherwise, it would go crazy," he said.
Today, olives are pulverized and centrifuged in stainless-steel equipment, but this manufacturing is still done in such a way that oil never sees light until it is put into a bottle. Even then, the glass is tinted green to minimize the exposure. This is why an Italian cook never leaves her olive oil out on the counter, but hides it away in a shady cabinet.
On one of my last days in Puglia, I was invited to taste-test various varieties at a bottling factory. While not as much fun as a wine tasting, an olive-oil sampling is instructive, nonetheless. The problem, I quickly found, was my lack of a vocabulary for describing the flavors of oil, such as I have developed for wine or cheese. Sensing my struggle, Olivetti d'Italia's Nicola Ruggiero offered some alternatives: Did I sense almonds, cherry or chicory?
When I asked him later about what he tastes, Rocco DiPietro of Baltimore's Il Scalino is clear. "In Sicilian olive oils, which I also love, you sense the presence of green tomato, but Puglia? They tend to have an artichoke quality."
I knew what he meant, but mostly I tasted pepper and grass, a sensation Ruggiero tells me is the surest indicator of new oil. This edge dulls fairly quickly and is almost completely gone in a year, so it is prized by the Pugliese.
There is a Pugliese expression that says "new oil, old wine," meaning they crave this astringent quality, something like a spritz of lemon, but less sharp. Chefs in the region drizzle just-harvested olive oil onto sauteed spinach or broccoli raab, grilled fish or a dish of pureed fava beans. It seems wonderful that this youthful zest comes from trees of such fantastic longevity. When I mentioned this to Ruggiero, he sighed.
"Yes, olive trees in Puglia ask us to re-explore and re-examine our humanity," he said. "They have survived wars, famines, conquests, births and deaths. They've seen whole civilizations come and go. When we drink Puglia's olive oil, we are literally ingesting history."
Braised Fennel
Serves 6
4 to 6 large fennel bulbs, quartered, or 1 dozen very small "baby" bulbs
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 garlic cloves
8 oil-packed anchovy fillets, coarsely chopped
1/2 small dried red chile pepper, chopped
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Bring pot of water to a rolling boil. Drop in fennel quarters or whole "baby" bulbs. Return to boil and cook, uncovered, for about 10 minutes, until the fennel is tender. Drain and set aside.
In a frying pan large enough to hold all the fennel, heat olive oil over medium-low heat and add garlic, anchovies and chile pepper.
Cook gently until garlic has softened. Mash the anchovy bits into the oil to make a paste. Add fennel and continue cooking, stirring to coat the fennel with the garlicky, peppery oil. Cook together, stirring occasionally, for an additional 5 minutes.
Spoon fennel from pan onto a serving plate, and sprinkle with freshly ground pepper. Serve hot, or let cool to slightly warmer than room temperature.
From "Flavors of Puglia" by Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Per serving: 145 calories, 4 grams protein, 10 grams fat, 1 gram saturated fat, 13 grams carbohydrate, 5 grams fiber, 5 milligrams cholesterol, 278 milligrams sodium