Shopping

Like many people, extra virgin olive oil is a staple in my kitchen. My roommate and I use it near-daily, for everything from fried eggs to roast veggies. But, unlike many people, I am a food writer — I should be more informed about the extra virgin olive oil I so liberally drizzle on everything, and I'm probably doing it right, right? The answer, it turns out, is wrong. Very wrong. I found this out within a minute of speaking with Selina Wang, the research director at UC Davis Olive Center , on the do's and don't's of shopping for olive oil. As it turns out, there's a lot I've been doing wrong — and, thankfully, some pretty easy tweaks I can make.Just about every grocery store has an extensive olive oil selection these days. And the crème de la crème is extra virgin, or unrefined, olive oil. Regular or light olive oils are more processed, and have less flavor. So where do you start? Wang says to look for one thing: freshness. "Buy the freshest olive oil you can buy, and once you buy it, try to use it as soon as you can," says Wang. That means buying smaller bottles more frequently — and paying close attention to the harvest date. "Sell by" dates can only tell you so much. Not only is the it fairly arbitrary, Wang explains that the oil producer could be tagging on as many as two years from the bottling date, sometimes a year after the harvest date, to come up with it. She recommends looking for a harvest date on the bottles, and finding the most recent one. No luck in finding a harvest date? Then your next best option is to find a bottle with the furthest possible expiration date. In her research, Wang found that extra virgin olive oil doesn't actually stay extra virgin forever — it loses flavor and eventually becomes rancid. There has been a lot of coverage over the past couple years about how so-called imported extra virgin olive oils are actually adulterated with other oils. But Wang insists that fake oils isn't really the problem (and she should know — she cowrote t he 2010 report that started a lot of the interest in olive oil quality). The real problem with imported olive oils failing to meet the "extra virgin" standard is age. Fresh is best, regardless of origin.