How is Olive Oil Made?
True extra-virgin olive oils come from the first milling of recently harvested olives. The production process consists of four basic steps:
- Cleaning the olives.
- Grinding the olives into a paste.
- Mixing the paste (called “malaxing” in the industry).
- Separating the oil from water and solids.
The traditional milling process uses very large millstones to grind the olives until the resulting paste is at the desired level of fineness; the milling must be done by purely mechanical means. After grinding, the next step is to extract the oil from this paste. Malaxing the oil allows the oil droplets to combine into larger drops. Finally, the oil is separated from water and solids, typically through centrifugation, after which the oil is “racked” in tanks to complete the separation and then prepared for shipping.