Pantry Peek

Brad (who writes ZMO's enews) and I are working on a Pantry Peek campaign for our Mail Order Enews. We'll go around to different people and take a picture of their pantry, hopefully unadulterated, unbeautified, and share what they have and why. I thought I'd kick it off with a blog post. This is what my counter top looked like today. (I'll do the cupboard another day.)

Back row, left to right

Frankie's 457 house olive oil. Frankie's is just down the street from me and pretty much every retailer in my neighborhood carries the Sicilian oil that the Franks select. It comes in a liter tin only, though I'm sure they probably bring in bulk containers since they say it's their house oil.

Moulin de Chartreuse Olive Oil. The Provençal oil we started carrying last year. This was the sample that I took to help edit the copy, though Brad wrote it I think. It's currently petering out as my cooking oil, something I usually employ a cheaper oil for (usually Lucini, it's pretty good and everyone around here carries it), but I ran out.

Mario Bianco's Moscato Vinegar. A white wine vinegar we used to carry. We stopped because I thought it was just a little too expensive for what it was.

Unlabeled Red Wine Vinegar from Marina Colonna. Ten years ago I visited Marina Colonna in the Molise and she had some dodgy bottles of vinegar someone had crafted from wine she makes. It tasted really good. For some reason or another she never decided to make any more, a fate shared by a line of olive oil cosmetics she had also made. She gave me a bottle to take home. A word of advice: don't pack vinegar in your suitcase. For that matter don't take samples from anyone when you're traveling. They always end up evolving into disaster.

Monini White Wine Vinegar. Rather crap vinegar I got for some reason I can't remember.

Pofi Brothers White Wine Vinegar. Pretty much my go-to for vinaigrettes and has been since I first tasted it.

Front row, left to right

Butternut Squash Seed Oil. We've carried this for a couple years. It was the first good American nut/seed oil I'd found—all the rest have been from France or Austria. It's a once-in-a-while thing I use for vinaigrettes or dousing a soup, raw vegetables or cooked vegetables. I probably shouldn't keep it near the stove but I know if I put it somewhere else I'll forget I have it.

Halen Mon Sea Salt. Or it could be fleur de sel sea salt just as often. I keep it in a little La Creuset pot and use it for salting dishes at the end. It's the salt I bring to the table if we have company, hence the little bone spoon.

Tellicherry Black Pepper. After busting my way through three or four pepper grinders Vic Firth's is the best one I've tried. I guess I beat the hell out of them because they just stop after a while. Not this one. I got mine before Mario Batali started licensing his name to them and now I think the only way to get a red one is if you get one with his name on it. Well, I like Mario, so that's not a deep tissue wound. The pepper is Indian Tellicherry pretty much all the time, and I keep the grinder set rather coarse.

Marash Red Pepper Flakes. Pretty much the only red pepper I ever use.

Portuguese Salt. The fine grade, which I pretty much use for everything except finish salting. This could just as easily be French grey salt, I have one or the other and switch up for no good reason. I house it in one of the old gorgeous fleur de sel jars that we used to get. Man I miss them!

Moonlight Oil

Daphne and Amalia

After Thanksgiving expired I spent the following morning at a café with Daphne and Amalia Zepos, the two sisters behind our exclusive Kokoraki olive oil from the island of Zakynthos, Greece. Amalia was in from Athens, visiting Daphne in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving.

It'd been two weeks since the olive harvest finished. Amalia shared details. All the olives were picked and pressed from October 27 to November 13. It's a blend of one part dopia (Greek for "local") and five parts Koroneiki olives. Yields were slightly lower than last year, which to her is a good sign for the flavor. She brought a bottle, the color was electric. She says that's typical for oil from Zakynthos. A minty phosphorescent green that surprises people from elsewhere in Greece, where oil is almost always yellow. 

It's the first time I met Amalia. She is poised, calm, relentlessly precise. She's new to oil making, having taken a seminar with author Judy Ridgway last year and learning otherwise by trial and error and constant discussion with the farmers. She keeps a notebook with each day's pressing notes. Kilos picked, olive oil pressed, rain or sun, temperature, and so on. This year she sourced a special filter tray from Crete to remove stems and leaves on the farm because the machine at the olive press doesn't work well enough for her standards. She's adamant about pressing without the addition of heat (cold pressed) so she waits at the local olive press until all the other farmers are finished and the press is washed and cooled. That often means pressing at 2 in the morning, by moonlight.

 

If pressing olive oil by moonlight sounds enchanting it's worth noting that it's just the latest chapter in the romantic history of this particular olive grove. Amalia holds a letter that details the ownership of the small farm since 1820. At that point it was bequeathed as a marriage dowry. Even then it was considered valuable, worth enough to win a lifetime commitment between two lovers. Many of the two hundred eight trees are from that period — or older. The newlywed family of two centuries ago would have had oil that's very similar to what we have today. Since then the grove has had four owners, the last being the family of Amalia's husband.

We currently offer 2008's harvest, the first bottled for sale outside Greece. It's a rare example of an estate bottled Greek olive oil. (Almost all Greek oil is made for personal consumption or sold to co-ops and blended.) The flavor is vibrant and bright, like the color. The 2009 harvest will be with us in late spring. The flavor now, intense and green since it was just pressed, promises to be delicious. Both harvests are certified organic.

Amalia is a documentary filmmaker. Here's a short piece she created during 2008's harvest.