Cost of olive oil

[Comedycook]

Wow!

Olive oil always used to be a staple for me but I switched a while back to veg/sunflower oil as much cheaper.

But today I wanted to buy some for a particular dish I'm making. I was blown away by the prices. Just a standard bottle of supermarket stuff...not extra virgin, was about £6/7. I found the tiniest bottle of supermarket own brand for £3.30...not ev or particularly special. The really decent stuff was closer to £10+.

So wondering...when you see TV chefs they start so many recipes with olive oil and I always used it too...but seems like it's going to be a luxury product now rather than a staple.

Do you use it for standard frying and cooking?

I buy Sainsbury's 2l tins for about £16 and decant into a bottle. It's a few pence cheaper per 100ml than the 1l bottle and is good quality.

Yes I still buy it but it has gone up loads

Canola oil is rapeseed oil.

Ahhh right

Thanks, that's helpful to know

I only know about it cos Costco do it in a spray bottle and it shows as v low in calories... I am wondering if it's mixed with something in that spray bottle

I use supermarket olive oil, but I do have it decanted into a spray bottle to try and use less of it

do you have any asian/middle eastern shops near you?

its ramadan soon and they always have offers for big 5litre cans of olive oil (2 for £24 last time I got it) and it lasted me a good 1.5 yrs.

maybe even check supermarket world food aisles as they might do similar offers

I changed to rapeseed oil a few months ago, and no one’s noticed….or if they have, they haven’t commented!

I will be buying mind from Home Bargains in future. I use it for cooking and the flavour of the meal is always much nicer.

I too have noticed the price increase.

It's not. In Aldi it has definitely gone up! It's cheaper than other places though.
I use it for all my frying, salads etc.
I don't fry that much, only to brown.

Do you use it for standard frying and cooking?

noooooo

we use extra virgin for dressings and to finish dishes. it gets smokey and bitter if it gets too hot.
for frying we use sunflower or vegetable oil and add maybe a little butter or butter fat (ghee) for flavour.

it got so ecpensive due to weather conditions (drought) in the growing regions. in addition a plant disease that kills olive trees is spreading like wildfire.
it will not get cheaper anytime soon.

I live in Spain so you can imagine how much it's used here. We have a massive water crisis so olive production is compromised forcing prices to shoot up

I get mine from Costco.

I also read somewhere that other oils, especially corn oil, are not good for you.
I buy it primarily because I like the taste and its goo for you.

I keep an eye out in Lidl after Greek week or Spanish/Iberian week as they usually then discount the large tins of evoo they buy for the event week.

But I'm fortunate in that I drive to Italy a lot and bring home a few bottles each time. It's not cheap but a much better selection and quality for the price.

I use rapeseed for deep frying and olive oil for shallow and saute.

Usually, if a recipe calls for butter, I put a drizzle of olive oil in the pan before melting butter in it, as it stops the butter from browning and burning too quickly.

@Comedycook Oooo do you have any details pls? I’d love to get some fresh from the press single crop olive oil.

It’s definite not this cheap in Lidl anymore!

Funnily enough I bought a big bottle in Lidl this week and it had gone up to £5. I did do a second take when it went through the till.

How do you work out if an olive oil is good quality or not?

@OolongTeaDrinker

I was £3 something, £3.75 perhaps last time. Certainly not over £4 I then got 15% off with a coupon. Though thinking about it the bottle we have currently dp bought so must have been December I bought it

Be careful with labelling on cooperative olive oil products. As the name suggests, it’s often a joint effort.
DFIL had some olive trees in his hobby vegetable plot and one year we made the effort to harvest them. A tiny amount and no care taken. We took them to the cooperative and had to wait for more small producers to join us in making up a batch, then each one got the yield according to the weight they’d put in. IIRC he got about 30L.

It was amazing stuff, very concentrated as the trees hadn’t been watered, but the fact that there had been NO QUALITY CONTROL DURING CULTIVATION meant we’d taken a huge risk and we told anybody we gifted it to just that.

I’m sure if the cooperative is selling to the public it will be fully certified. Just watch out for locals offering you stuff “under the counter”. It’s all “genuino” until someone ends up in hospital from eating tainted wild mushrooms!

Rape seed oil tastes like cabbage to me. I can’t bear it.

It is increasing

Why olive oil prices are soaring and what to do about it - BBC Travel

Looks like harvests aren't as good as normal

I don't drink alcohol but when I was asked by work what bottle I wanted at Christmas I had a bottle of Spanish olive oil.

The OP is talking about how expensive olive oil is, and your response is that they should look for single country origin olive oil?

Yes, if you are paying olive oil prices you want to be fairly sure you are getting olive oil! Or you may as well just buy cheaper oil.