Since the very beginning of our Healthy & Delicious journey, we've never underestimated the importance of olive oil as a key ingredient in pretty much everything that was to come from our kitchen. As part of Louisa's early adventures sourcing in Italy, finding a versatile, flavour-filled olive oil which would be ideal for using throughout the cooking process as well as making a fabulous finishing touch for our Italian dishes was vital. Excitingly, not only did she succeed in finding a delicious flavoured oil but we're now in a position to sell it via the Healthy and Delicious shop, in a variety of sizes, so it can be used to create the authentic flavours of the Mediterranean through cooking at home.
Our olive oil comes straight from Southern Italy...
from olive groves on the sunshine soaked slopes of the craggy, beautifully rural area of Basilicata. Here the olives are grown and harvested using tried and tested traditional methods, unchanged for hundreds of years and that's why the olives produce the best possible oil.
Part of the Healthy and Delicious ethos is to 'give something back' by ensuring we support some of the wonderful, small Italian local businesses and communities which we've discovered through the development of Healthy & Delicious. We've built up relationships with Italian farms and financially support the planting of tomatoes and crops as well as ensuring we buy all the delicious, organic ingredients that we use in our gluten-free dishes at a very fair price.
The olives which are used to produce our Healthy and Delicious olive oil are harvested in the Autumn, in line with the time-honoured lunar calendar which has led the farming communities activities for centuries. Once the olives are at their optimum ripeness and every last one has been picked and gathered up, they're taken to the village olive mill where they are stone cold pressed using traditional tools and processes.
The olive oil produced is a superior quality, extra virgin, rich and fruity oil - suitable for a wide range of uses from roasting mediterranean vegetables, adding to dough for pasta or gnocchi or combining with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar for a delicious simple salad dressing.
We've packaged our Healthy and Delicious olive oil in traditional cans...
Simple, sustainable and extremely smart. They come in a range of sizes: 3, 5 and 10 litre cans and they look lovely enough to give as a gorgeous gourmet gift. Available to order now via the Healthy and Delicious shop.
We'd say that our extra virgin olive oil is well worth trying (and once you have, you'll never want to use anything else!).