I don't write about, dream about, or have a passion for canola oil. It, and its cousins, soybean oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, are in the class of cookware, not ingredients in my mind. They serve two purposes only, to evenly distribute heat from the pan to the food being cooked, and to add flavorless fat molecules to a dish; both admittedly vital purposes in cooking.

There are many fats that do fall under the rubric of ingredient: pumpkinseed oil, most nut oils, butter, bacon fat, lardo, and high-quality olive oil. Sometimes I'll call it superior olive oil or extraordinary olive oil, because I still haven't settled on a proper name for the category yet. What I do not call it is extra virgin or EVO.

Going to a market and using "extra virgin" (or for that matter "cold pressed" or "first pressed," though that's a story for a different day) as a determining factor of how good an olive oil tastes is the equivalent of going to a car lot and saying "I'm only interested in pickup trucks that have passed the guidelines for federal safety." Extra virgin is quite possibly the lowest bar one could set while shopping for olive oil.

If we lived in one of the thirty-odd countries that had signed on to the International Olive Oil Council (a United Nations body which sets the definitions for "extra virgin," "virgin," etc.), which we don't, then the words would at least carry some legal meaning. Let's pretend that the words on olive oil bottles on the U.S. supermarket shelf actually do legally mean something for this blog post. What does extra virgin mean?

Extra Virgin means that the olive oil passed two chemical tests and a tasting/olfactory test soon after the olive oil was extracted from the olive. The purpose of the two chemical tests are to determine that the olive oil is not rancid, nor remarkably close to going rancid. The purpose of the tasting/olfactory test (which is done by a panel of IOOC trained experts) is to determine that there are no negative flavors or smells in the olive oil (often from improper handling of the olives or oil in the field or after harvesting). That's it. Notice I didn't say anything about positive flavors or smells. The entire purpose of the test is to make certain the olive oil isn't defective, not to make certain it's exceptional. If it's only slightly defective, then it will be called "virgin."

If the olive oil is more than slightly defective, than some chemical extraction of those defects will be necessary before it's even considered edible. If a bottle contains some olive oil which has undergone chemical extraction, then the most it can hope to say on the label is "olive oil" or "pure olive oil." If the word virgin appears on the label, the implication is that only physics was used to extract the oil from the olive (crushing, pressing, centrifuge, whatever), but no chemicals. (Just remember, we're still in this fantasyland where the words actually carry legal meaning in the United States.)

So, if you ever wonder why there's bottles of extra virgin olive oil on the shelves ranging from $6 a liter to $60 a liter, that's part of the reason why. Some of the bottles carry cookware in them to help heat up your food and some contain an actual ingredient that can add to and enhance the flavors of your dish.

How to tell the difference is the purpose of my being here.