OLIVES FROM TREE TO PRESS

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fragrant, silvery green breezes rustle through vibrant olive trees all over Croatia. It’s a well-earned source of great national pride – and a healthy Mediterranean cuisine. Folks commonly bring their backyard olives to local press houses for their own fruity and delicious brand of olive oil. I quickly became swept up in the olive oil craze while I was living there, soon becoming uninterested in cooking with anything else. (With the exception of coconut oil in its proper place.)

But this multi-generational grove is on the stunning Adriatic Island Brač. I became fascinated with Koraljka immediately upon meeting her – she’s a force of grace and strength and intellect, and I hope to pick with them some October day. Her story goes like this, translated from German:

“Our Olive Oil from Island Brač is made by my family, the Mastnaks. (I am Koraljka, a radiologist; my husband Boris, an internal rheumatologist; our son Viktor, a surgeon; and our other son Bastian, a dentistry student.]

Our special relationship with olive trees began in our earliest childhood. In our family, no meal, whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner, was served without precious and healthy olive oil. Our teacher Hippocrates, known

*Editor’s Note:

Dalmatia is the southern region of Croatia, also encompassing vast swaths of stunning Adriatic Islands. According to britannica.com, ‘The first recorded inhabitants of Dalmatia were Illyrians (the name Dalmatia probably comes from the name of an Illyrian tribe, the Delmata, an Indo-European people who overran the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula beginning about 1000 BCE)’.

as the “Father of Medicine,” recommended the usage of olive oil not only for a better wound healing but generally for a long and healthy life.

As enthusiastic olive oil users and doctors, we have decided to produce extra virgin olive oil on our nearly 100 year-old olive grove, thriving in a highly natural and eco-friendly cultivation. The goal is to guarantee a high quality, native product for tasty pleasure on the one hand and good health on the other hand.

Our olive grove is located on the sunny, southern west hills of the island Brač, close to village Ložišća and Bobovišća, in the region of Dalmatia*.

The olive trees belong to the autochthonous type‚ Oblica‘, which means oval in Croatian. Typically, these trees have middle sized fruits and their leaves show a darker green. Hot and dry summers without artificial irrigation on the island force the olive trees into a stress situation whereupon they react with a higher production of polyphenols to survive and defend themselves against insects and fungi. Furthermore, the antioxidant concentration in the olives is even higher the sooner the ripening process is interrupted –so our method is to pick the olives in an earlier stage when they are still green or some of them turning brown.

The profits of high valuable olive oil with this method of production and our demanded quality standards is relatively low and varies around 8-14%. This means we must pick approximately 100kg (220+ pounds) of olives, to get 10L (2.5 gallons) of olive oil. Should we pick them green or black? bitter or ripe? What taste do we prefer? Those questions play an important role in the local, native olive oil production. Our technique provides oil with a high quantity of valuable antioxidants such as polyphenols, tocopherols and squalene’s, which all benefit your health by preventing or slowing damage to human cells caused by free radicals. During the harvesting time members of our family and friends gather on the island and spend a week all together picking olives by hand, having picnics, enjoying the last warm days of the year and take the baskets full of olives to the mill in the evening, where they are cold-pressed entirely. The same evening, we can already dip some bread in our own extra virgin olive oil – that not only serves good for frying and tastes great — but is evidently known for its health benefits such as preventing heart diseases, lowering the risks of strokes, combating cancer and reducing inflammation.