26th January 2005
Putting Olive Oils To the Taste Test
For our olive oil tasting, we selected nine bottles in different price ranges, deliberately avoiding house
brands. Some are easily available, while others can be purchased at gourmet food stores, some farmers
markets or on the Internet. Chefs Cesare Lanfranconi, Ris Lacoste and Jose Andres graded the oils on a
scale from 1 to 10 and suggested best uses. Here is what they said:
Washington Post
OIL |
COLOR |
AROMA |
TASTE |
BEST FOR |
ASSESSMENT |
Pornanino Farm extra virgin,
first old-pressed;bottled by the
olive grower Franco Lombardi in
Tuscany, Italy; 18 fluid ounces,
$29 |
Cloudy but good color |
Good aroma as well.
Super fresh.You can
smell the grass. |
Good balance of acidity,
spiciness and grassiness.
|
A salad where you want to
savor the taste of the oil. |
It must be Tuscan.
Grade:Almost a 10
|

The Times and The Sunday Times Archive
In Tuscany for the
olive harvest, JONATHAN FUTRELL finds himself led down a culinary
trail, tracing the finest virgin oil in its progress from branch
to table The only picking I like to do on holiday is sand,
from between my toes, on a beach. In fact, whenever I come across
handwritten signs, always on scrappy bits of cardboard, by the
roadside, proclaiming "pick-your-own", I instinctively want to
turn off and shake some sense into the scores of unpaid pickers
bent double in the field. If God had intended us to spend our
leisure time on our hands and knees, he would not have invented
farmers.
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Post Gazette
I've been to my share of olive oil tastings, but none was more persuasive
than a recent one at the Hyeholde Restaurant in Moon. The olive oil that
Franco Lombardi and his family make on their farm in Tuscany may not be
the only pure oil on the market, but it seems certain, from the care taken,
that none could be more pure.
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Slick Oil Merchants
[From the lead article in theWeekend Australian Review of May 22-23, 1999, written by Clare Pedrick; Telephone: 02 9288 2312; used with permission]
Franco Lombardi represents a new breed of olive oil producer in Italy. He is anxious to protect the image of the product in the face of mounting doubts about the quality of some of it.
He has an orchard of 4000 olive trees, all grown from saplings.
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Reizen 1999
Wat er schuilgaat in Toscane
Door P. J. Vergunst
De zon heeft het hoofd van Franco
Lombardi meer dan gemiddeld gebruind.
Aan een marmeren tafel,in de schaduw
van het huis, vertelt de zestiger
ondersteund door langzame gebaren
over Toscane, zijn druiven en olijven
zijn cypressen en kastelen, zijn stil-
le stadjes en gezonde keuken.
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Food Illustrated
Franco
Lombardi is obsessed with purity. For him, the finest extra virgin
olive oils are those that have had the least contact with man or
machine. "We don't use tractors to harvest the olives because
we might break some of the branches," says Franco.
After talking with
Franco, you get the impression that in his ideal world he would like
to be able to turn olives into olive oil by magic, without them ever
coming into contact with a human.
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