So what exactly does it mean when you hear the words 'refined oil' and why the negative connotation? In an excerpt from Tom Mueller's excellent book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, the author visits a pomace plant in Italy where they receive and process "huge piles of pomace, the solid residue of olive skins, stems, pits, and leaves left over from olive oil extraction, which actually still contains about 8 percent of the oil made by the olives." He goes on to explain the process:"Front-end loaders dump the pomace into a large hopper, from which it moves into a steel tube heated by the furnaces, that rotates slowly until most of the moisture in the pomace has evaporated. The dried pomace is transferred into tall silos and drenched with hexane, and industrial solvent. After the residual oil dissolves into the hexane, leaving the pomace, a blast of steam as loud as a cannon-shot drives the mixture of solvent and oil into a separate tank, where it's heated to evaporate off the hexane. What's left is a dense, black liquid known as crude pomace oil. Before this oil can be sold as food, it's piped into a refinery in an adjoining building for desolventization, deacidification, deodorization, degumming, and other chemical processes. The resulting clear, odorless, tasteless fat is blended with a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to give it flavor, and is sold as "olive pomace oil."
Mmm, sounds delicious, no? Basically all of the healthful properties that make extra virgin olive oil such an amazing super food are all but lost in the refining process of pomace oil and what you are left with is no better than any other seed oil, which in my opinion should all be avoided as much as possible.
I feel this is an important topic to discuss after a recent conversation with some family members who were enjoying an evening dinner at an up-scale restaurant in their area. As is common today, their waitress started off their meal with a basket of bread and a dish of oil for dipping. When asked what kind of olive oil it was, the waitress returned from the kitchen, proudly stating that it was a pomace oil from Italy! Now I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be given butter, thank you! You wouldn't dip your bread in canola oil now, would you?
Therefore I offer a challenge: the next time you are at a restaurant being served oil in that little white dish, to ask what kind of oil it is. Of course taste is a dead giveaway, too. If the oil has very little flavor, any hint of rancidity (think of the taste of crayons), or is abnormally light in color, much like a vegetable oil, kindly suggest to your server, restaurant owner, or chef, that the oil they are serving has no business on their guests' tables and should be used strictly in the kitchen for cooking and frying. The more restaurants realize their customers' knowledge of olive oil is expanding, and that there is a demand for real extra virgin olive oil, the more they will listen and meet that demand.
