Written by Martin Seymour | Editor, The Mayfair Foodie | About Me
Every time I travel to the Mediterranean, I’m amazed at the quality of the olive oil. Go to Greece, Italy, Portugal or Spain and the extra virgin olive oil that arrives at the table is bursting with flavour — and like the wine, every region and every producer has its own character.
It reminds me of something a very experienced head waiter once told me: the olive oil a restaurant serves says a great deal about the meal to come. If it’s good, with plenty of flavour, the chances are you’ll eat well. It’s the restaurant’s calling card, and it arrives before you’ve even ordered.
I came back from a holiday in Greece recently determined to find out more. I use olive oil every day, for cooking and for dressing, and I’d happily spend twenty minutes reading the back of a wine label. Yet with olive oil I’d been picking up whatever looked respectable and getting on with it. The information simply isn’t there in the same way. “Extra virgin” is a legal grade, not a promise of quality, and once you’re past those two words, most bottles tell you remarkably little.
Which is where Ben and Elle Caring come in. They know a thing or two about olive oil — enough to launch their own brand, Krude, alongside Gordon Ramsay — and they’ve set out four things worth checking before a bottle goes in your basket. The four headings below are theirs. The detail underneath is a mix of their advice and what I’ve dug up since.
First — what “extra virgin” actually means
Worth clearing this up, because it’s the part almost everyone gets wrong.
Extra virgin is the top grade. The oil has to be extracted mechanically, without heat or chemicals, come in under a set level of free acidity, and — this is the bit people miss — pass a trained tasting panel with no detectable defects. Virgin olive oil is the grade below: still mechanically extracted, but with a little more acidity and minor faults permitted.
Anything labelled simply “olive oil”, or “pure olive oil”, is a different product altogether. It’s refined oil — stripped of flavour and most of its antioxidants — with a splash of virgin oil blended back in for taste. And “light” olive oil refers to the flavour, not the calories. It has exactly as many as the good stuff.
So extra virgin is a floor, not a ceiling. Two bottles can both be legitimately extra virgin and taste nothing like each other. Here’s how to tell them apart.
1. Check where your olive oil actually comes from
Turn the bottle round. If the small print says “product of the European Union” or “blend of EU and non-EU olive oils”, you’re holding oil that could have come from almost anywhere, bought on the open market and blended to a price. It isn’t necessarily bad oil. But nobody is standing behind it.
What you want is specificity. A named country is better than a continent. A named region is better than a country. A named estate or mill is better still. The more precise the label, the more the producer is willing to be held accountable for what’s inside.
It’s also worth knowing that the flag on the front doesn’t always tell you where the olives grew. Spain is comfortably Europe’s largest producer — in a good year it makes more oil than the rest of the continent combined — with Italy second, then Greece and Portugal. A fair amount of that Spanish oil is shipped elsewhere, bottled, and sold under another country’s branding. Perfectly legal, and perfectly common.
The Carings make traceability their first point, and it’s the right place to start. Krude’s olives are traceable to family-run farms in Spain, where the same families have worked the land for generations. “We use olive oil every day,” they say, “but most of us don’t think twice about where it comes from.”
What I look for: a named region, and a producer who seems pleased to tell you about it.
2. Look for early harvest and cold extraction
This is the single biggest lever on flavour, and hardly anyone talks about it.
Olives can be picked green and unripe, or left to ripen and go black. Pick early, and you get far less oil from the same tree — which is why early-harvest oils cost more — but what you do get is intensely green, grassy and peppery, and loaded with polyphenols, the antioxidant compounds responsible for both the flavour and most of the health interest in olive oil. Leave the fruit to ripen, and yields go up while the oil turns milder, softer and rounder. Neither is wrong. They’re different tools.
“Cold extracted” or “cold pressed” means the paste was never warmed past a set temperature during extraction. Heat lifts yield and destroys the aromatics, so the cold stuff costs more to make and tastes considerably better.
While you’re reading, look for a harvest date rather than a best-before. A best-before is a legal date somebody calculated. A harvest date tells you when the fruit came off the tree — and olive oil, unlike wine, does not improve with age. It’s at its best within the first year or so.
Krude selects early and cold extracts, which is where its peppery, high-polyphenol character comes from.
What I look for: a harvest date on the label. Its absence tells you something too.
3. Think about the packaging — light and oxygen matter
Olive oil has two enemies, and both of them are usually winning.
Light degrades it. Oxygen degrades it. A clear glass bottle sitting under supermarket strip lighting for three months is close to a worst-case scenario, however good the oil was when it went in. Dark glass is better. A tin is better still, because no light gets through at all.
The same logic applies once the bottle is home. Keep it away from the hob — the warmest spot in the kitchen is the worst place for it — and buy a size you’ll genuinely get through in a couple of months rather than the catering tin that looks like better value. From the moment you open it, the clock is running.
It’s the reasoning behind Krude’s packaging: UV-protective metal cans, with a spout designed to control the pour and limit how much air gets back in.
What I look for: tins, dark glass, or a bottle in a box. Never clear glass on a bright shelf.
4. Taste it — good olive oil shouldn’t be flavourless
Here’s the test, and it costs nothing.
Pour a little into a glass, cup it in your hand to warm it, and taste. You’re after three things. Fruitiness — green, grassy, sometimes tomato leaf or artichoke. Bitterness, which sounds like a fault and isn’t. And pepper: a catch at the back of the throat that can genuinely make you cough. That peppery kick comes from oleocanthal, one of the polyphenols. It turns out that’s about the most reliable sign of a fresh, well-made oil you’ll find. Professional tasters rate oils on a cough scale. I’m not joking.
What you don’t want is nothing at all, or the smell of wax crayons, putty or stale nuts. That’s rancidity, and it’s so widespread that a lot of people have quietly decided it’s simply what olive oil tastes like.
Then match the oil to the job. A robust, later-harvest oil is your everyday workhorse for roasting and frying. A punchy early-harvest oil is wasted in a hot pan and transformative over burrata, soup, grilled fish or a plate of tomatoes. As Gordon Ramsay put it when Krude launched, olive oil “should hit the plate with purpose”.
What I look for: a cough. Then I decide which drawer it lives in.
And can you actually cook with extra virgin olive oil?
Yes, you can. It’s the question that comes up more than any other, usually from someone who’s been told extra virgin is a waste in a hot pan or, worse, that it’s unsafe. Both are myths — extra virgin has been my preferred oil to cook with for years.
Extra virgin olive oil has a smoke point somewhere in the region of 190–210°C, comfortably above the temperature of most domestic roasting and shallow frying. And because it’s rich in antioxidants, it tends to hold up under heat rather better than a lot of neutral refined oils that boast a higher number on paper. For normal home cooking, it is a perfectly sound choice.
The real argument against it isn’t safety; it’s economics. Put a £30 early-harvest finishing oil in a hot pan and every delicate aromatic you paid for disappears in seconds. You’ve bought perfume and used it as petrol.
Which is why the sensible approach — and the one Krude has built its two core oils around, Cook Me for the pan and Finish Me for the plate — is to keep two bottles. One robust and reasonably priced for cooking.
One good one you treat with some respect. It’s the same instinct as keeping one wine for cooking and another for drinking — though I’ll confess I’ve never believed in cooking with the cheapest bottle in the supermarket. Nor, admittedly, with the best. It’s the change that’s made the biggest difference to how I cook.
The short version
Look for a named origin, a harvest date, packaging that keeps the light out, and a flavour with some bite to it. Then buy two — one to cook with, one to finish with.
None of it requires a certificate. As the Carings put it, “you don’t need to be an expert — it’s simply about knowing what to look for.”
I’ve got a set of Krude on the way to try properly, so I’ll report back on how it tastes once I’ve cooked with it. In the meantime, the next time you’re standing in the oil aisle, turn the bottle round. There’s more on the back than you think.
Krude’s Cook Me and Finish Me extra virgin olive oils are stocked in Waitrose, with the full range — including chilli, garlic, lemon and basil infusions — available direct from the brand. Prices start at around £13.
