If you have a few olive trees, you'll want to produce your own oil; not to sell, but for the pleasure of consuming something that you have produced yourself.

But the world of olive oil; the different types of oil, the different types of olive, is complicated. Yes, in the supermarkets we find Virgen Extra, Virgen and Orujo (Olive pomace oil), but there is another, which you won’t find on the shelves in a separate bottle and that is lampante.

Lampante is a defective oil that which cannot be consumed directly but has to be sent to a refinery, heated, chemically treated, turned into a neutral fat, and then mixed again with a bit of virgin or extra virgin oil. In fact, it was originally used in cortijos as lamp oil; hence lampante.

So when you see a bottle saying that it has a mixture of olive oils, most likely it contains a high percentage of processed lampante.

Each year there is a maxium amount of olive oil that can be produce, depending on the overall crop… and don’t forget, acetunas are also sold to be eaten and don’t end up in being used to produce oil.

If you harvest early, you get excellent quality but far less quantity; if you harvest later, you get less quality but more quantity. If you wait too long, you will not get even more oil, but lampante… and that’s the trick, you see, that middlemen deal in. They buy up the abundant lampante, process it and then mix it in with virgen extra or virgen.

So, farmers are encouraged to harvest later, produce lampante by the some mills, because the middlemen want quantity, not quality.

So, what is the difference between Lampante and Orujo? The difference between pomace oil (orujo) and lampante oil (lampante) lies in their origin and extraction methods, though both are unfit for direct human consumption in their raw states.

Lampante Oil: this is technically a ‘defective’ virgin, olive oil. It is obtained directly from the olive fruit using mechanical processes. However, because the olives were damaged (by pests, being gathered from the ground, or over-ripening) or due to poor processing, it has a high acidity (above 2%) and unpleasant flavors or odors.

Pomace Oil (Orujo): this is obtained from the solid residues (skin, pulp, and pits) left over after the virgin olive oil has been extracted at the mill. Since mechanical pressure cannot extract the remaining oil from these solids, chemical solvents are used for extraction.

So, read very carefully the labels on the oil bottles; if you want quality, then make sure that it is ‘pure’ virgen extra.

Finally, Spain produces a quarter of all the olive oil produced in the world.

(News: Andalucia)

Keywords: Olive Oil, Lampante, Orujo

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