Gooramadda Olives Extra Virgin Olive Oil production

One of our customers mentioned one day that Extra Virgin Olive Oil was made from very ugly olives....not sure if that is correct ?

Let's cut to the chase: this is what's it about



In general terms Extra Virgin Olive Oil needs to have an acidity level of between 0 percent and .8 percent and has to be free of defects in order to be classified as Extra Virgin, and that's a global arrangement.

It's not hard to produce Extra Virgin Olive, all you need to do is press fresh olives at the right stage of ripeness, un-damaged, not spoiled, free of leaves and other foreign objects, at a cool temperature and use the right equipment for the job and ensure that the equipment is clean .
Once the oil is pressed you need to look after the oil, keep it cool, away from light and from contact with air.

Kathy and I produce olive oil which has an acidity level around the 0.1 percent... and we produce some of Australia's most outstanding oils, how come? what do we do different?
...let me explain.

We work along the principle that many small quality steps make one big quality step and we try to achieve the best possible at each step in the process.
You could call this a variation to HACCP, this being a QACCP ( Quality Analysis and Critical Control Points)

We have established where quality needs to be controlled, what the critical limits are and what the control measures are to achieve the quality

Well, before I start explaining what we do....there are in in general two different methods of extracting olive oil.
There is the traditional cold press method, this is what we do at Gooramadda Olives, and then there is the more modern way of oil extraction by the use of a horizontal centrifuge.
If you are in the business of making olive oil, at a very efficient extraction rate, with minimum labour input, try one of those centrifuge machines...they work very well...and we encourage all our competitors to use these types of machines
We us the Traditional Cold Press method to extract our precious olive oil.
"Cold" meaning that the olive paste is not heated to extract more olive oil and "pressed", well, oil is extracted by using pressure.
For this we use two hydraulic presses.



Unfortunately, as a result, we suffer the fact that we have to work longer and harder to get the oil out.But it is all worth it in the end.
And,we get a very special oil, win prizes, get good feedback from customers and produce something very different.
That's the business we are in, we aim at the quality end of the market, if you want something special, something different and of top quality......visit us.
If you want good olive oil, good for general use, good for the chips and sausages... well, there is plenty to chose from on the supermarket shelves.

So, what's this Traditional Cold Press and what's this about small quality steps?
Cold Press means that olive oil is extracted by means of pressure and that temperatures of milled olives are not increased above ambient conditions.

So, what what's the process?
First we harvest the olives by hand, using manual rakes and electric rakes. Raking the olives onto large nets on wheels, so olives do not get in contact with soil and soil borne diseases.

This is a picture of the wheeled frame without the net, so if you want to copy it, feel free. The net needs to be added on top

The frame can be wheeled under the tree and olives can be raked onto the net, giving the olives a soft landing.
From here the olives are stored into ventilated crates and are transported to he factory.

We only pick on one day what we realistically can process the next day, this overcomes the problem of having to store olives and as a result we only press fresh olives.
The next morning we dump the olives onto the inspection table and remove all leaves and foreign matter before they enter the olive hopper.
Here you see Kathy at work


After this, the olives are washed and milled.
For milling we use a stainless steel hammer mill.
Some tradionalists still use a stone wheel to crush the olives but we think that our hygiene standards can not be achieved by using a stone wheel crusher, let alone any OH&S issues, anyway, after milling we fill the "malaxer" with about 150 Kg of milled up pips, skins, flesh and olive liquid.



On the right you see the olive hopper, followed by an incline conveyer where the olives get washed and above the hopper in the center of the picture you will see the motor driving the hammer mill.
There is already a cage in the ready to receive the product after it has been "malaxed"
Well, what's this "Malaxing" bit?
Let me explain, if you break open an olive you will be hard pushed to see any oil in it, that's because olive oil in the olive consists out of minuscule oil dropplets, to small to see.
By gently agitating the milled olives, those dropplets stick together and form larger dropplets, something you can do something with.
After about 30 minutes, when malaxing is finished and oil is formed, we start filling the cages as the system we use is called a "tandem-cage-press"
Which means that we can press two cages at a time.
This is one of those cages, they consist out of perforated stainless steel rings onto a movable frame.



The cages are filled with the paste from the malaxer and every couple of kilo's of paste we slip in a steel pressing mat.
The reason we use the mats is that the hold back the pips, skins and olive particles during pressing.
Pips, skins and particles lodge themselves onto the perforations in the mats and as such stay between the mats while the olive liquid is gently squeezed out.
This is one of those mats and as you can see we only use stainless steel mats as they will not impart any contamination to the olive oil.



After the cages are filled they are placed under the hydraulic presses and gently the liquid is squeezed out of the flesh of the olives.



The liquid from the press, which is a mixture of olive oil and water, is collected into buckets.
This liquid is transported and tipped into gravity separators, of which we have six off.
Here you can see the separators.



Now we are getting close to the end of the process.
We leave the olive liquid in the separators and over a time span of one to two hours the oil will have drifted to the top section of the separator and the water will have gone to the bottom.
As we know, oil floats on water so ....the system works well !
Then, we feed in slowly a small amount of water into the bottom of the separator and push, very gently, the water and olive oil up.
And by doing so we push out the oil through a hose fitted on the top of the separator and we collect the oil in containers.
We keep on adding water to the bottom of the separator until we see water arriving at the hose ...and then...we switch off the water supply.
You don't need to be a engineer to work this out, do you?
After this the oil is stored in variable capacity stainless steel tanks

Here you can see some of these storage vats.



There is no need to filter the oil as the advantage of a press is that the pips and skins act like a sand filter during pressing.
This filtering during pressing holds back any olive fibers and bits of olive flesh, so...our oil keeps all its original properties and nothing goes down the drain.
One of the other reasons we produce such a good oil is that we keep our equipment clean !
Every day, after pressing is finished for the day, we high pressure wash all disks.
We dismantle the mill and hot water wash the mill and malaxer.
So next day, when we start, we start with clean equipment and there is no left over stuff hanging in corners from previous day.

well, just a suggestion....when you get your precious olives pressed by your local olive mill, do inspect the equipment and make sure you are happy with the level of cleanliness...it's your oil that come out and you don't want it contaminated.

back to home page