Cathy Rogers - The Dolce Vita Diaries

Here are our tasting notes from that evening:

It tastes sweet, of apples or sweetpea. Full flavour and aroma of grass, but a bit thin. Made from Frantoio and Leccino olives. Jax’s favourite.

Vanilla, avocado, honey, soil, artichoke heart. What an exotic cacophony of flavours. Creamy at front with a kick at the back. Made from Picholine olives. Aloysia’s favourite.

Deep, rich olive flavour of grass and fresh mown hay. Peppery, too. From a blend of olive types. Jason’s favourite.

Round mellow and delicate flavour maybe more suited to an American palate. Very pale colour. Picholine olives. No one’s favourite.

Ingredients for olive oil tasting

Bread—white

Representing

Pour each oil into a white saucer, so you can get a good look at the colour and viscosity. Cut the bread into small cubes. Dip in oil and eat. Simple.

Word on the street is that the bread can modify the flavour and mask the subtleties of the oil, so for purists dispense with the bread and instead pour some oil on a teaspoon, suck it into the month with a slurp and wait for it to flow down the back of the throat.

Ingredients for cold infusions

Rosemary—a big sprig

Dried chilli—one large one or several small

Black peppercorns—a small handful

Garlic—a whole bulb

We’ve worked out two ways to infuse the oil. The first is what we call warm infusion, where we gently heat the flavourings in a saucepan of oil for maybe an hour. Then there is cold infusion, where we leave the flavouring in the olive oil for a couple of weeks—the flavour slowly ebbs out in a more natural way. Things like lemon rind or basil, which contain water, go mouldy if you cold infuse them. But on the other hand, when we heat up the oil the result is a bit bland because the volatile aromatic flavour compounds are destroyed.

Our success stories so far have been cold-infused dried chillies, rosemary and roasted garlic (we nuke the dastardly bacteria with a good roasting).

Get creative and mix up whatever ingredients take your fancy. You will need a variety of glass bottles, corks and funnels. You are best off sterilizing the bottles beforehand—10 minutes in boiled water will do the job.

Simply put your flavourings into a bottle and then fill with olive oil so that they are covered and there are no air bubbles.

To roast the garlic, preheat the oven to 190° C /gas mark 5, wrap the whole, unpeeled bulb tightly in kitchen foil and roast for about 40 minutes or until the cloves are soft. Once the bulb is cooled down a bit, pull off individual cloves and shove as many of them down the neck of the bottle as you can. Then fill and cover with oil.

Just when we’d really got the hang of infusing the lemon rind we discovered a lemon olive oil from Olivier’s & Co. which is vastly superior and made in a completely different way. In contrast to an infusion, here the lemons and the olives are crushed together in the olive press. The olives and lemons are ‘joined at the pip’, Cathy likes to say. We’ve taken to drizzling this oil on fish and chicken or as a lazy salad dressing (just add a pinch of salt). But best of all we use it to make lemon mayonnaise (gives a citrusy lift to potato salad, or try dipping grilled asparagus spears in it) and lemony ravioli.

Ravioli al sapore di limone, con burro e salvia

Ingredients for 4 people

Plain flour—300g

Eggs—4

Lemon olive oil—1.5 tablespoons

Ricotta—300g

Spinach—120g cooked and finely chopped

Marjoram—a couple of fresh sprigs

Salt and pepper

Butter—40g

Sage—a big sprig

Find a nice big clean workspace. Pour the flour into a mound and make a well in the middle. Break 2 eggs into the well and whisk in with a fork, gradually bringing in more and more flour. Add the lemon olive oil (or normal olive oil for a general pasta). When there is a lumpy mass sticking to your fork turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. I find it hard to believe 5 minutes is so long when I knead the pasta, so I make myself keep going for a couple of songs on the radio.

When the dough is smooth and homogeneous, cover it with a kitchen towel and leave for half an hour. Then get your pasta machine together—we have a hand-cranked Atlas 150, which has been kicking around for ages and remains faithful.

Cut the pasta into 4 manageable pieces. The trick is to roll the pasta through the machine 10 times on the widest setting, folding it back in half each time. The dough should be beautifully smooth.

Now work your way down the thicknesses on the machine from 1 to about 6. You should have beautiful sheets of pasta, which you need to lay out on a floury surface. This pasta recipe is the basis for all shapes. In general if you need a bit of elasticity (like for ravioli) use olive oil, if not (like fettuccine) go easy on the oil.

To prepare the filling mix together 2 egg yolks, the ricotta, spinach (you can use frozen if you don’t have fresh, just make sure it’s well thawed and drained), marjoram and a couple of pinches of salt and pepper.

Back to the pasta sheets. Put a teaspoon of the filling mixture at regular, well-spaced intervals. Paint around them with the egg whites. Lay another pasta sheet on top and press down over the mounds of filling. Cut into ravioli shapes with a pasta cutter.

Bring a pot of water to boil, with a bit of salt and olive oil. Cook for about 2 minutes. Whilst it’s cooking, make the sage butter. Gently heat the butter in a frying pan with the slightly torn-up sage leaves. Spoon out the ravioli into your serving dish, cover with the sage butter and serve.

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