How to Make Olive Oil by Hand

Making olive oil by hand can be remarkably simple as long as you have a few basic materials and some patience. Your homemade olive oil can be used for cooking or as a dipping element for fresh, crusty artisan bread. Your friends and family will be impressed with your culinary skills and begging for your secrets in the kitchen. You will never want to dip your bread in store-bought olive oil again.

Things You'll Need

• 6 or 7 fresh olives
• Knife
• Small, stemmed water glass
• Large glass tumbler
• Mesh tea strainer
• Shot glass

Instructions

1. 

   Select your olives based on how you want your olive oil to taste. Obtaining your olives from an olive bar will ensure that the olives are of high quality and taste good. Green olives will lend themselves to a more acidic olive oil, while black olives will lend themselves to a nuttier, less acidic olive oil. If you like the taste of the fresh olives, chances are good that you will also like the olive oil from those olives.

2. 

   Score each of your olives all the way around using a small kitchen or pocket knife. The scoring should be deeper than the skin of the olive, but not so deep that you are actually slicing the olives. This scoring is what is going to allow the olive oil to escape from the olives.

3. 

   Place your olives into the bottom of a small, stemmed water glass and then set the small water glass into the larger water tumbler. The tumbler needs to be large enough so that if the water glass were to overflow, it would catch the drippings.

4. 

   Set the mesh tea strainer over the rim of the stemmed water glass so that the hooks on the outside of the strainer rest securely on the rim of the glass. Rest the shot glass inside of the tea strainer. The shot glass will act as a weight to help keep the tea strainer in place during the oil making process.

5. 

   Fill the water glass with water, all the way to the brim of the glass so that it is on the verge of overflowing. The water will act as a weight that will push the oil out of the olives. The oil will rise to the top of the glass and drip out into the large water tumbler the glass is resting in.

6. 

   Allow the water to press the oil out of the olives for 24 to 48 hours. When you return to your glasses, you should see that the stemmed water glass is still filled with water and olives, while the tumbler it is resting in contains a few tablespoons of olive oil.

7. 

   Taste the fruits of your labor. For your first batch of handmade olive oil, you may choose to sample it raw with some fresh crusty bread. Be sure to choose a bread with a mild flavor so that the nuances of your special oil shine through.

Tips & Warnings

• If you enjoy your olive oil and want to make a larger batch, you can do so easily by increasing the number of olives you use for pressing, along with the size of your glasses and strainer.

• Do not store fresh olive oil as you would store-bought olive oil. Fresh olive oil has a small amount of sediment in it that causes the oil to spoil more quickly. Limit your storage time of fresh olive oil to only a few days.

References

• Top Tour of Spain: How to Make Liquid Gold
• Olive Oil Source: Making Olive Oil

Resources

• Meta Cafe: Make Your Own Extra Virgin Olive Oil (Video)