22/04/2021
MUSEUM of the OIL MILL
Close to Catanzaro Lido, on the Ionian Coast of Calabria, there is a wonderful “Museum of the Oil Mill” made out of a real Olive Oil Mill from 1934.
It was property of Baron Mazza, who owned several thousand acres of land.
Most of his land estate was covered (and still is today) by Olive Grows, producing tons of olives that would be harvested in a short amount of time: only a couple of months.
In order to make Extra Virgin Olive Oil it is necessary to harvest the olives between October and November, and process them immediately after harvesting: 2 hours max, otherwise the olives start fermenting and the acidity exceeds 1%, wasting the product.
In the old times, up to the 1950s, the same device used since the beginning of times was used to make olive oil: large granite wheels to grind the olives and manual presses to squeeze the oil out of the olive paste. The grindstones were turned by animals (donkeys or oxen) who, walking in circles, pulled the wheels. This was a slow process and much slower was the manual pressing process, so slow that they would process in three days the amount of olives collected in one day.
This resulted in a huge amount of olives left rotting in a corner, waiting to be crushed. On the other hand, they could not wait beyond the end of November to harvest the olives, because otherwise the approach of winter would have wasted them forever. So, Baron Mazza in 1934 decided to improve all this and set up a new “advanced” Industrial Olive Oil Mill, which worked until 1955. The wheels were made turn by electric engines, the presses were driven by hydraulic pumps.
Once the olives were brought to the Mill, first they would get rid of the leaves that are always found among the harvested olives, using a partly manual device that basically blew on the olives wile a guy was kind of stirring them, and the leaves were swept away.
After that, the olives were washed to clean them from the dust in a sort of “washing machine for olives”. Once cleaned, the load was placed into the grinders that would squash the whole olives, the bone included.
The resulting paste was put into the “fiscole” (round pockets made of canvas), the fiscole were piled up in the presses and the hydraulic pumps would do the rest. This was the “first cold pressing”, the best quality olive oil, but there was still a little bit of oil in the remaining paste. They would grind the paste again in the “Molazza” (a bigger grindstone) and put it in the so-called “Mega-Presses”, to squeeze the last drop of olive oil from the “sansa” (the pomace, this is the name of the dry leftovers from the pressing).
The liquid obtained from the pressing was only partly olive oil (only 20-25%), the rest was water; so it was placed in settling tanks and left there untouched for a few days.
The olive oil, lighter than water, would rise to the upper part of the tank, separating itself from the water and facilitating the collection. After WWII, in the late 1940s, new “separators” began to be used in Italy. Basically, they are centrifuges: spinning very fast separate the heavier part (water) from the lightest (olive oil). Strange enough, the new separators were invented in Northern Europe, where they were used to make butter from cow’s milk.
The remaining water was not directly thrown away but stored in big tanks until the end of the harvesting. This is because there was still a little bit of oil in it: once the water was settled, people could collect on the surface the oil left. Obviously, this last olive oil was dark, dirty and very acid, it was not edible; but in the old times people would make soap out of it, mixing the olive oil with soda and pork fat: hypoallergenic soap.
The Wisdom of the Ancestors…
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