I was lucky to live in a crab mecca during college: Annapolis, Md. Fresh blue crab was – and still is – everywhere. You could go to an unpretentious restaurant, sit at a simple table covered with paper, and whack the steamed crabs with a wooden mallet to free up the meaty morsels inside.  Crab cakes were – and still are – another great dish.

Fortunately, we’ve hooked up with a company that specializes in crab: Baltimore-based Phillips Foods. They shared a recipe for chilie lime crab cakes with chipotle avocado mayonnaise.

These crab cakes are made with chili garlic paste, among other ingredients. And the avocado mayonnaise gets a dose of dried chipotle chili.

We recently prepared these crab cakes and did a bit of improvising with what we had on hand. For example, we substituted Japanese-style panko bread crumbs for crushed crackers.

We also tweaked the cooking method. Phillips suggests sautéing the cakes in extra virgin olive oil until golden brown on both sides.  We sautéed the cakes until golden brown on one side; we then carefully flipped them and placed our ovenproof nonstick skillet in a hot oven ( around 400 degrees F) to finish the cooking. Either technique should work fine.

Phillips also offers helpful tips for making crab cakes. A key piece of advice: It requires a delicate hand, both when combining the ingredients and when forming the cakes.

“When shaping the crab mixture . . .  be gentle and use your hands to gently press and shape the cakes,” the company notes on its Web site. “One trick is to add the largest lumps of meat last so you don’t break the lumps.”

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

I’ve been asked the question, “What exactly is a drizzle of olive oil?” Our friends in the culinary world have offered up a variety of responses. I’ve since come across another intriguing measurement for olive oil: a “glug.” The term seems to owe its use to British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who uses it in his recipes.

At 34, Oliver has climbed to the top of the cooking world. He’s a TV star, operates restaurants, has his own magazine, and has penned a number of cookbooks. His recipes contain amusing directions, being at times detailed and other times vague.

“Trim and wash a large leek, remove the outer leaves, then slice it into 0.5cm/¼ inch pieces,” he writes for his roasted chicken breast with pancetta, leeks and thyme.

“Add these to the bowl with the leaves of a few sprigs of fresh thyme, a good glug of olive oil, small knob of butter, a pinch of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and a small swig of white wine and toss together.”

More examples:

• His recipe for oven-baked rigatoni with wild boar salami calls for “a good glug of olive oil.”
• The grilled or roasted monkfish with black olive sauce and lemon mash specifies “a couple of glugs of extra virgin olive oil.”
• And the crispy tortillas with guacamole says “3 glugs of extra virgin olive oil.”

So how much is a glug? “A glug is, um, a glug,” replied Oliver’s spokesman Peter Berry. “There’s no real ‘definition,’ as such but everyone knows what a glug is.”

Uh, okay.

We did, however, find a explanation of sorts on the forums section at Oliver’s web site.

“When you pour olive oil from the bottle it will usually come with little interruptions when air goes back into the bottle. The result is a sort of  glug, glug, glug … sound,” wrote a fan identifying herself by the moniker SusanneH. “One of those is as much as you need” for a glug.

SusanneH went on to explain “the exact amount is not so important and may depend a bit on your personal taste. So if you use roughly 1-2 tablespoons you should be fine.”

We tried to define a glug ourselves the other night while making a variation of garlicky spaghetti with Olio Nuovo (we substituted Arbosana for the Olio Nuovo.) The recipe called for about three-eighths of a cup of olive oil, providing us with the opportunity to measure how many glugs went into it. We lost count after about 20 of them.

We turned our attention to twirling and slurping the pasta.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Mover over Italy and Spain. Make way for California.

California’s olive oil industry has been on a tear the past decade, producing extra virgin olive oil rivaling the EVOO made in Italy, Spain, France, and elsewhere. And it appears our industry is positioned to become a heavyweight in the Golden State’s agriculture business.

I’m not the only one predicting this. A recent report from the Olive Center at the University of California, Davis, says “if the trends of recent years continue, olive oil will be a major California crop in the future.”

The UC Davis study offers a snapshot of our industry. It focuses on the method we use to plant our trees: super -high-density plantings. The result: a fresh, high-quality EVOO.

The speed in which we can harvest olives prevents the olive from decomposing before we extract the oil. The UC Davis study examines the super-high-density (SHD) olive industry starting in 1999 – when the first SHD olive trees were planted in California – through 2008. It shows that

• 12,138 acres of SHD olive trees were planted in California by the end of 2008.
• Large growers, including California Olive Ranch, accounted for 78% of all acreage planted; small growers followed at 12%; and medium growers accounted for 10%.
• Arbequina is the No. 1 olive variety planted in the SHD system, accounting for 78 percent of SHD acreage, or 9,400 acres.
• Arbosana is the No. 2 varietal at 16 percent, or 1,688 acres
• Koroneiki is No. 3 at 6 percent, or 681 acres

At California Olive Ranch, we have more than 5,000 acres of olive trees in northern California. We cultivate another 5,000 acres through the growers we work with under contract. All told, we have a bit more than 6 million trees under cultivation on some 10,000 acres.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Food writer Jessica Strand creates vinaigrettes that tend to be versatile. They’re great with salad and can serve as marinades or sauces for poultry, seafood and other fare. I wrote recently about her cookbook, Salad Dressings (Chronicle Books, 2008). I’d like to share her excellent recipe for grapefruit vinaigrette.

While it certainly can be used as a marinade for chicken or fish, Strand told us she prefers it on white fish such as sea bass or snapper, or used for a seafood salad with shellfish such as clams, mussels, lobster, etc.

When it comes to greens, Strand likes to pair this vinaigrette with a salad of escarole, avocado, and bite-size pieces of Ruby Red grapefruit – like the dish in the photo.

Now that it’s grapefruit season, Strand suggests pairing fresh grapefruit juice with champagne vinegar, grapefruit and lime zest, a dash of honey, and extra virgin olive oil.

Strand said she favors grapefruit “for their tart yet sweet” finish.

“It’s sweeter than a lemon, yet more tart and tangy than an orange,” she said. “It’s the perfect flavor to enhance the subtle flavor of white meat or fish.”

Strand also gave us this tip if you happen to be out of grapefruit but have other citrus fruits on hand: “I’ve combined lemon and orange as a way of getting that balance of tangy and sweet.”

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Italian film legend Sophia Loren attributes her natural beauty to “spaghetti and the odd bath in virgin olive oil.” I haven’t tried it myself. But Sophia seems to be on to something about the health benefits of olive oil. A Greek study published recently suggests women who eat lots of olive oil and fish – and not a lot of red meat – have healthier bones.

The Greeks took a different approach from past studies. Others have focused on the relation between a particular nutrient, such as calcium, and bone health.

The Greek study, conducted at Harokopio University in Athens, examined the impact of what people eat. The study looked at the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in olive oil and plant foods such as fruits and vegetables. It also also studied other eating patterns. The results appeared in the journal Nutrition.

The researchers followed 220 adult Greek women. X-ray technology was used to analyze the bone mineral density of the women’s lumbar spines as well as the bone mineral content of their entire bodies.

The study’s conclusion: Sticking to a diet with some features of the Mediterranean diet – “high consumption of fish and olive oil and low red meat intake” – was “positively related to bone mass.”

The researchers said the results suggest “potential bone-preserving properties of this (dietary) pattern throughout adult life.”

Apparently, Sophia Loren was on to something that scientists hadn’t quite grasped … until now.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

In this country, we have bakeries. In Italy, they have focaccerias. I’m a focaccia fan. The flatbread hails from the Mediterranean coast. Its roots, I learned, date to antiquity.

“In ancient Rome panis focacius denoted a flatbread cooked in the ashes,” writes food historian and author Alan Davidson in The Penguin Companion to Food (Penguin Books, 2002). In ancient Rome, focus meant hearth. There followed the term focacia, and ultimately focaccia in modern Italian.

Residents of the south of France have their own version of the yeasted flat bread: fougasse.

Focaccia and extra virgin olive oil are a natural pair. Olive oil is used as an ingredient. And olive oil frequently is drizzled or spread on top of the dough to keep it moist.

The toppings are countless – from EVOO and sea salt to herbs, onions, cheese, vegetables and meat. The sky’s the limit. Although from our standpoint, less is more. The one pictured here is topped with fresh rosemary.

Olive oil expert Fran Gage developed a focaccia featuring pumpkin seeds and thyme. They’re mixed into the dough. One of her favorite bakeries makes loaves of bread studded with pumpkin seeds.

“It was an inspiration for this focaccia,” Gage writes in her book The New American Olive Oil (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009).

Gage suggests using a medium or robust EVOO. The latter includes our  Olio Nuovo and our Arbosana. But I’m sure any good EVOO would do the trick.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

We’re tuned into cyberspace – including Twitter and the blogosphere – so we see a lot of what people are saying about olive oil. Not surprisingly, we occasionally run across stuff that’s just plain wrong.

Fortunately, there are plenty of online experts jumping in to debunk bogus info.  “Just crap” is how Australian olive oil expert Richard Gawel described a misleading blog.

Two bits of misinformation caught our attention recently and I’d like to dispel the inaccuracies.

For starters, it’s just plain wrong that olive loses its healthy benefits when used in cooking. Likewise, it doesn’t transform into something unhealthy when heated above 350 degrees.  (Gawel used the “crap” comment in a Tweet about a blog post involving a discussion that erroneously tried to link olive oil – when heated to a certain temperature – to trans fat even though there’s absolutley no truth in that at all.)

People ask us if you can cook with extra virgin olive oil – or if it should be used only to finish a dish such as roasted vegetables or fish. Yes, you can roast and fry foods with EVOO. The food will taste better, for starters.

And, notes nutritionist Karen Collins, EVOO doesn’t suffer a significant loss in health benefits when used to cook. Collins is a nutrition adviser for the American Institute for Cancer Research, a nonprofit which funds cancer-prevention research.  “Olive oil is a very healthful oil and most people are aware of its heart-healthy monounsaturated fat,” she says.

Collins told us she wrote a piece for the AICR web site to deflect misinformation she’d read online about cooking and olive oil. In a Q&A, Collins responded to the question of whether EVOO “loses its health benefits when cooked?”

No, she says. It doesn’t destroy the polyphenols EVOO contains. Polyphenols, by the way, are chemical substances found in plants that may reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer.

The most surprising item we’ve found was a blog wrongly suggesting olive oil forms trans fats when heated. Trans fats are something totally different. They’re otherwise known as partially hydrogenated oils and are found in stick margarines, shortenings and some packaged goods and fast foods.

“Eating trans fats increases your risk of developing heart disease and stroke,” says the American Heart Association. “It’s also associated with a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”

Not a good thing, of course.

No matter what you do while you’re cooking at home, you fortunately can’t create trans fats yourself. They’re created through an industrial process known as hydrogenation, in which hydrogen is added to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid.

“The hydrogenation process involves heating up oil under extreme pressure and then bubbling hydrogen gas through it in the presence of a Palladium metal catalyst,” Gawel writes in an informative FAQ. “For trans fats to form all of these conditions must be in place – heat and pressure and hydrogen gas and an appropriate catalyst.”

“It just can’t happen in your kitchen.”

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

We’re lucky to have a friend who’s been flying regularly to Alaska for the past ten years to go halibut fishing. Bill went again in September, traveling to the fishing port of Seward. He hooked lots of halibut, which was then quick frozen. Bill was kind enough to share some with us. The timing was perfect: Award-winning cookbook author Marie Simmons had just given us a fish recipe.

Marie’s recipe looked easy and great – and we needed a photo. So we fired up the oven and got out the cutting board and a knife. We weren’t disappointed.

The fish is roasted in the oven at 450 degrees and then drizzled with a dressing made from freshly cut herbs, extra virgin olive oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and sun-dried tomatoes.

“Roasting fish at a high temperature for a short period of time is a classic fish preparation method that I love because it’s fast,” said Marie, whom we met recently at a Culinary Institute of America conference in California’s Napa Valley.

Marie also told us she’s “a big fan of anything citrus.” She adds it to a variety of dishes, including cooked tomato sauce and her salad dressing creations. “So that accounts for the sauce on the fish.”

The fish – you can use halibut, swordfish, salmon or Pacific cod – also gets a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil before going in the oven.

“The olive oil adds both a subtle flavor and moisture,” said Marie, noting it’s especially important for providing moisture when roasting a less fatty fish like halibut. “I also love the buttery taste of California olive oil because it complements rather than masks the delicate taste of the fish.”

The fish can be served warm, at room temperature or chilled. And you can mix and match the herbs, using basil and parsley as substitutes for the dill and mint. “Or use a little of each, selecting a total of three to four herbs if you have them all on hand,” said Marie, who also writes a great blog on fast and fresh vegetarian cooking.

“The most important hint for any cook is to taste, taste, taste. Never serve any dish until it’s been tasted and the flavors adjusted.”

You can also check out Marie’s raw fennel salad recipe if you missed it when I blogged about it the other day.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

It’s amazing to think Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Tom Hanks and scores of other Hollywood stars will soon get a chance to try our extra virgin olive oil.

Our Olio Nuovo EVOO will be one of the ingredients used to to prepare the dinner at the Golden Globe Awards Show Dinner on Jan. 17, at the Beverly Hilton. The hotel’s executive chef, Suki Sugiura, began planning the menu for the gala event last summer. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sponsors the Globes. In the photo – which shows our EVOO – Chef Suki is providing a media preview of the dinner he’ll be serving.

The chef — a veteran of four Golden Globe dinners — is a big proponent of our EVOO.

He’s serving Tinseltown’s heavyweights a locally inspired menu showcasing the bounty of California’s agriculture. Every ingredient will come from the Golden State, from our Olio Nuovo to the mozzarella to the beef short ribs.

“This is a message from California,” Chef Suki told the Associated Press. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that some of the finest ingredients in the U.S. are right here in California.”

The chef also is adhering to a California theme of “cooking light.”

“There’s not so much butter. And cream — forget it,” he told the AP.

Instead, according to the news agency: “Fresh herbs and local olive oil add flavor to the appetizer salad and the beef and sea bass entree (that comes from Central and Southern California).”

The entree, for example, will pair our EVOO with an aged balsamic vinegar that accompanies the sautéed sea bass and the herb-braised short ribs.

Chef Suki and his kitchen staff of more than 100 have been extremely busy. Some 1,700 meals are expected to be served during events tied to the Golden Globes. The Jan. 17 gala banquet alone is expected to draw nearly 1,300 movers and shakers. The chef also is responsible for preparing the food for a half dozen parties thrown after the big dinner.

He and his team are prepared to work from 6 a.m. to well past midnight on the 17th.

“It’s the busiest day of the year,” he told the AP.

No doubt.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Turn over Marie Simmons’ business card and you’ll see a rundown of the cookbooks she’s written. There’s The Good Egg, a James Beard Award winner, the hugely popular 365 Ways to Cook Pasta, and the award-winning Lighter Quicker Better. Simmons is prolific. She’s published more than 20 cookbooks, plus countless articles on cooking and food.

She’s also a cooking instructor – and now a blogger serving up fresh and fast vegetarian dishes.

We met her recently over lunch, during a Culinary Institute of America conference in California’s Napa Valley.

We’d read Simmons’ articles over the years and were familiar with her reputation as a food expert. So we wondered how she ventured into the world of food.

She says she wasn’t born knowing how to write a cookbook but was groomed for the task by being born into a family of avid cooks.

“My fondest childhood memories are not of dolls and games, but of Saturdays spent in my grandmother’s – affectionately known as Nana – kitchen rolling out cookie dough, shaping fresh pasta, or peeling apples for pie.”

Simmons shared with us a recipe showcasing fennel,  now very much in season.

This raw fennel salad is easy, featuring a dressing of extra virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice. It’s gracefully topped with a generous helping of “curls” shaved from a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano. You can use a cheese plane to make the decorative curls.

Simmons also advises using a mandoline or other type of vegetable slicer to cut the fennel into paper-thin slices.

“Once you make this salad you don’t need to look at the recipe again,” says Simmons. “It’s that simple.”

She said she was inspired to create the dish by fennel salads she’s eaten at Italian trattoria in this country and in in Italy.

Fennel is highly aromatic and flavorful. It’s a member of the parsley family. Fennel has been used in Europe for centuries as a source of seeds for flavoring and as a vegetable. The stalk is the part you eat. In addition to serving it raw in salads, you can also serve it  braised and grilled.

“I love this vegetable for its crisp texture and subtle licorice taste when it’s raw and for it’s silken softness and sweet flavor when cooked,” says Simmons. “Either way it’s one of my favorite winter vegetables.”

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch