A ten-second thought on olive oil, flavour, and the puzzling twenty percent for whom this doesn’t work: Is it obvious that olive oil is really flavourless for everyone? Taste buds do differ. Olive oil does not seem flavourless to me; it has a sort of floury taste. For that matter, perhaps different brands have different additives, and some people get a flavour response to something or other?
Disclaimer: I did not put five minutes of thinking into the above; I rattled it off quickly. It may be stupid.
Seth Roberts recommends “extra light olive oil” (also known as “extra light tasting olive oil”). This is a type of olive oil that has basically no flavor. (It does have a bit of a smell, so I hold my nose when I drink it. Note also that despite the similar names, this is not the same as “extra virgin olive oil”, whose flavor and aftertaste are too strong for Shangri-La use.)
I think that olive oil seeming flavorless to anyone would be an exception rather than the rule, if there’s anyone at all with a sense of taste of whom it’s true.
The branch of Fairway I usually visit has a large number of samples of various types of olive oil under their own brand label out at all times. While I generally don’t agree with the descriptions of the oils given in the writeups by their own olive oil experts, I can attest that many if not all of them are easily differentiable in a blind taste test, and they have no additives, just oil from different types of olives grown in different locales and harvested at different times.
I think that olive oil seeming flavorless to anyone would be an exception rather than the rule, if there’s anyone at all with a sense of taste of whom it’s true.
To me, olive oil of any sort has practically no taste or smell. Olives have a strong taste, but olive oil is not even slightly reminiscent of olives. If they were not called by the same name, it would not occur to me that they had anything to do with each other. Other vegetable oils also taste of nothing. And yet, my sense of taste is not generally insensitive: the very first time I encountered chopped coriander leaf (in a salad, not in a labelled jar), I guessed at once that it was the same plant that coriander seed comes from.
So, there is indeed someone with a sense of taste of whom it’s true.
I suspect there is a large variation in senses of taste that largely goes unnoticed. Alcohol also has no taste to me, yet some people specifically don’t like the taste of alcohol.
The olive oil I usually use has a pretty strong taste, and I’m able to distinguish different artisan olive oils from each other if I’m paying attention, but my understanding is that the extra-light olive oil that Seth Roberts cites is processed to neutralize its flavor. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if it was tasteless or nearly so to most people.
A ten-second thought on olive oil, flavour, and the puzzling twenty percent for whom this doesn’t work: Is it obvious that olive oil is really flavourless for everyone? Taste buds do differ. Olive oil does not seem flavourless to me; it has a sort of floury taste. For that matter, perhaps different brands have different additives, and some people get a flavour response to something or other?
Disclaimer: I did not put five minutes of thinking into the above; I rattled it off quickly. It may be stupid.
Seth Roberts recommends “extra light olive oil” (also known as “extra light tasting olive oil”). This is a type of olive oil that has basically no flavor. (It does have a bit of a smell, so I hold my nose when I drink it. Note also that despite the similar names, this is not the same as “extra virgin olive oil”, whose flavor and aftertaste are too strong for Shangri-La use.)
I think that olive oil seeming flavorless to anyone would be an exception rather than the rule, if there’s anyone at all with a sense of taste of whom it’s true.
The branch of Fairway I usually visit has a large number of samples of various types of olive oil under their own brand label out at all times. While I generally don’t agree with the descriptions of the oils given in the writeups by their own olive oil experts, I can attest that many if not all of them are easily differentiable in a blind taste test, and they have no additives, just oil from different types of olives grown in different locales and harvested at different times.
To me, olive oil of any sort has practically no taste or smell. Olives have a strong taste, but olive oil is not even slightly reminiscent of olives. If they were not called by the same name, it would not occur to me that they had anything to do with each other. Other vegetable oils also taste of nothing. And yet, my sense of taste is not generally insensitive: the very first time I encountered chopped coriander leaf (in a salad, not in a labelled jar), I guessed at once that it was the same plant that coriander seed comes from.
So, there is indeed someone with a sense of taste of whom it’s true.
I suspect there is a large variation in senses of taste that largely goes unnoticed. Alcohol also has no taste to me, yet some people specifically don’t like the taste of alcohol.
The olive oil I usually use has a pretty strong taste, and I’m able to distinguish different artisan olive oils from each other if I’m paying attention, but my understanding is that the extra-light olive oil that Seth Roberts cites is processed to neutralize its flavor. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if it was tasteless or nearly so to most people.