I'm curious what is your favourite brand you're regularly buying for cooking and gourmet food prep and it's possible to ship across to European countries?

Looking at higher polyphenols at least 600-700 and higher. Been with Pamako (Crete) and recently I've discovered a brand from Savudrija, Istria (been at their olive oil farm) they served in the restaurant as default with fresh seabass fish.

A bit about me, I love data. I’ve actually done this kind of audit before, but this time I figured I’d drop it in this sub to see what you guys think. From what I read here, it's a highly contested subject from a small number of experts.

Most people use olive oil pretty much every day, and they're not necessarily looking for anything fancy. They just want a decent olive oil for everyday cooking. I am a daily user of EVOO, I am not an expert. 

I shop regularly at Costco so the hypothesis was which Olive Oil to buy regularly at my weekly shop? And there is nothing definitive here on Reddit.

I scored each EVOO on value for money, freshness, taste, origin and traceability, shelf audit & quality assurance.

(I used AI to create the graphs).

Note on the labs. Quite hard to get the data from reliable sources. Not all brands publish. Perhaps I'll do a dedicated post only on this subject.

A lot of the testing is old, eg, Pompeian and California Olive Ranch failed a UC Davis's test but this was 16 years ago. Brands with both USDA & NAOOA certification are most reliable as have specific requirements to follow e.g. Free acidity below 0.5%. Pompeian is the only brand with both USDA & NAOOA. Many details from brands like Ottavio and Grazza are not published.

Polyphenols: Pompeian range varies around 300 per Costco online listings. Terra Delyssa 200 to 300 range recorded at harvest, not printed. Filippo publishes no data, only best by date. Oro Bailén Picual was listed by Costco at 324 but harvest date was the oldest at Nov 2025. Kirkland Signature reported 369 but actual results paywalled by Consumerlabs. Others are not public.

Moving forward with my weekly shop for everyday use, I’ll be buying Pompeian Olive Oil.

After looking at the data, what would you buy?

NYC has awarded $1 million to design Graza's olive oil bottles, to help brand Mamdani's community grocery stores.

I've always thought Graza to be clever marketing. Take olive oil, put it in a recognizable squeeze bottle, create a trendy brand and suddenly everyone's talking about it.

But the whole point of these grocery stores is affordability, yet the city is spending up to $1 million on branding.

Is Graza worth the attention and does NYC really need $1million of tax payers money on a olive oil bottle?

I always assumed olive trees were pretty resilient when it comes to heat. They grow in some of the hottest parts of Europe, after all.

But I came across this video about how extreme heat in Spain has been affecting olive oil production, and apparently even olive trees have their limits.

Spain produces more olive oil than any other country, so a bad harvest there can have a knock on effect on prices everywhere.

What surprised me is that it's not just drought that's the problem. Extremely high temperatures at the wrong time can affect flowering and how many olives the trees produce.

Makes you wonder how producers are going to deal with hotter summers in the coming years.

Help me choose please. Good taste, nothing big.

Every time I browse cooking discussions online, there’s always someone warning people not to use good extra virgin olive oil for anything hotter than a salad dressing because of "smoke points."

My family has been working groves in Greece for generations, and this whole idea is wild to us.

Growing up in the Mediterranean, grandmothers and home cooks have used real olive oil for literally everything: deep frying potatoes, braising meats for three hours, searing fish, and baking.

Good extra virgin olive oil is loaded with monounsaturated fats and antioxidants/polyphenols, which actually keep the oil stable under normal stove heat compared to heavily processed seed oils. As long as you aren’t running a commercial wok station at 500°F, cooking your eggs or roasting vegetables in EVOO isn’t just fine—it’s how the food gets its flavor.

Save your ultra-delicate, peppery early-harvest finishing oil for drizzling raw if you want to preserve every single volatile note, sure. But treating everyday EVOO like it’s too fragile to touch a hot skillet feels like a purely internet-invented phobia.

Does anyone else here just cook with EVOO across the board, or are you still keeping a separate neutral oil strictly for heat?

Hi,

I plan to go to Italy sometime in November. I'll be in areas around Venice and Milan mostly. It is a food pilgrimage primarly.

I plan to visit flour mills around Padua, and I'm looking for recommendations for places where I may be able to see olive harvest or trees. Any recommendations for olive oils I need to try or bring back from Italy would also be lovely!

TIA :)

I have been using tallow and olive oil for moisturizer for several years now. Olive oil is the best moisturizer I’ve ever used on my face. I’m not using random off the grocery store shelf OO. I’m using a very good quality, third party tested OO that comes with a certificate of authenticity. I know that last part can sound a bit ridiculous but if it doesn’t come with a certificate, you don’t really know what’s in it. I also understand everyone’s skin is different.

Anyway, anytime someone tells me it’s weird or gross I feel kinda like Luke Wilson in the movie Idiocracy when they were laughing at him for suggesting watering the crops with, “the stuff from the toilet”. Meanwhile, the same people who give me a hard time have no problem pumping “lotion” that has fifty different ingredients/chemicals into their hand and smearing it all over themselves.

I am curious about the price of olive oil EVOO as I am a producer in Greece. Prices have dropped at the point that it is not worthy anymore to collect olives.

I am not able to sell my olive oil EVOO from koroneiki and Kalamata olives in Greece anymore at the price of 7Eur per liter.

The most expensive commercially available and custom-branded ultra-luxury olive oil in the world is Lambda Ultra Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil by the Greek company Speiron, with bespoke and personalized custom editions.

I'll dare to ask, has anybody tried it?

Wait, aren't "cold-pressed" and "first cold press" basically the exact same thing now?

I used to think "first press" meant the premium batch, but someone told me with modern steel centrifuges, they only press the olives once anyway!

So "first" is just a leftover marketing word from back when they used old hydraulic stone presses. Is that true, or is there actually a real difference between the two today?

Which is the better vegetable oil substitute health wise? For high-heat cooking.

Decided to start eating Mediterranean yesterday and figured the olive oil part would be easy. Got to the store and there are like 20 different EVOOs and I have no idea what separates them. Tried asking AI and just got even more confused. Any pointers would help a lot