At the SA Olive Oil Awards held outside Paarl earlier this week, 36 extra virgin olive oils received Gold Awards, while 53 Silver and 11 Bronze medals were awarded.
Tag Archives: Andante
Top local extra virgin Olive Oil Finalists for ABSA Top 5 announced!
The ten Finalists for the 2015 ABSA Top 5 Olive Oils have been announced, and the Top 5 extra virgin Olive Oils for this year will be announced in Franschhoek next week.
The Finalists are Andante EVOO (Medium), Andante Intense EVOO, De Boerin EVOO
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[spasie] opens as new unique underground experiential dining in Cape Town!
Secret restaurants have been operating in Cape Town for a year or so, SecretEats having attracted attention to underground restaurants, which pop up in interesting venues such as art galleries, furniture design exhibitions, warehouses in Observatory, and in private homes in Llandudno and Tamboerskloof. Now [spasie] has opened in Cape Town, using the same formula of different chefs preparing the dinners, and guests sitting at one long table, with one difference – the restaurant space of [spasie] is fixed.
It is not clear why Greg Zeleny, the creator of SecretEats, has created a different brand, as he was not present at the [spasie] dinner to which I was invited. JP du Toit was our
host, and told us that he looks after the dinners every Thursday and Friday, and that his colleague Zak Averre handles weekday daytime food from the same space. It was like a homecoming, the venue being across the road from the former Haas, in the building where the Haas ad agency had its offices, and where the Haas kitchen prepared the food for the Haas coffee shop. We had hosted a Food & Wine Bloggers’ Club function in the same venue, when it still was an art gallery for Haas. JP studied Biochemistry, and lived in Japan for two years.
The chef of the week was Chef Nick Charalambous, a Silwood Cookery School student (Cordon Bleu Grande Diploma), and former colleague Continue reading →
First Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil in South Africa launched!
An unique ‘The Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil in South Africa‘ has been published, the first of its kind, providing an overview of olive oil production in our country, and providing details of the top quality olive oil producers.
Olives were first brought to South Africa from California by Piet Cillie in 1893. A mere 14 years later Jan Minnaar from De Hoop farm in Paarl won the prize for the best olive oil produced in the British Empire at the 1907 London Show! Reni Hildenbrand now owns the farm in Wellington on which Piet Cillie farmed, and she has written a book ‘Olives and Olive Oils in South Africa‘. Ferdinando Costa arrived from Genoa in Italy a few years later, and brought in Italian plants, grafting them on the local Olienhout rootstock. He planted large numbers of olive trees in Paarl in 1925, and pressed his first olive oil in 1935. The Costa name is synonymous with olives and olive oil, and his relative Linda runs SA Olive, a quality standards body for the industry. Italian Baron Andreis began planting olive trees in the ‘Fifties, using Carlo Castiglione to make olive oil from 1972, under the Vesuvio brand. Its Extra Virgin Olive Oil won four awards in Italy for the first time, and regularly wins international awards. Italian Guilio Bertrand bought Morgenster next door to Vergelegen just over twenty years ago, and saw the potential to produce quality wines and olive oils. He now runs an olive oil nursery, and won the SA Olive Lifetime Achievement Award last year.
The quality of olive oil quality is influenced by the terroir, cultivar, climate, and the oil maker, similar to wines. The biggest threat to good quality local Extra Virgin Olive Oils is inferior olive oils which are imported, and bought by consumers in the belief that the imported products should be of a better quality. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is extracted from the olives at a temperature below 30° C, Continue reading →