During our Sicily food tour, a highlight of the trip is spending time on a family-owned olive estate during the time of olive harvest and extraction of their excellent olive oil. We stroll with the owner in the orchards, gardens, and mill, and learn all about the process and about what goes in to making a great olive oil.

The olive orchard.

The vegetable garden.

We learned that:
- Harvesting the olives at the right moment, while still green, means maximum flavor and lower yields – they much prefer quality to quantity
- Getting the olives to the mill right away is important, so they don’t sit and start to ferment
- Rinsing and sorting them thoroughly, to remove leaves and twigs, helps too
- Extracting the oil using the gentlest mechanism possible, to produce the least heat during the process, also maximizes quality and flavor

The care they take during the entire process means they create an intensely flavorful, fresh oil, with an incredible color too.

Here are two video snippets from one of our visits.

First, the olives being milled – the estate we visit mills its own olives. The olives are hand harvested in their orchards, and driven to the milling building. The olives are unloaded onto a conveyor belt, which takes them into the rinsing stage, they are hand-sorted, then dried, and then move into the extractor, which turns slowly and gently to separate the oil from the solids.

The second video is of the owner, Gabriella, talking a bit about the olives and the harvest process. The harvest goes on for weeks, and she and her father and other family members and workers, work pretty much around the clock.

That evening, we all sat down to a wonderful dinner in her villa of a variety of homemade local specialties, featuring their excellent oil of course, as well as produce from their gardens and fruit trees, local fresh and aged cheeses, and their house-marinated olives. Everything was delicious.

Walking up to the villa with Gabriella

The first course - local cheeses, and homemade spreads and marinated olives.

Last month we paid a visit to the artisanal candy company D. Barbero in Asti, Piedmont, Italy, and were given a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour by Davide – he and co-owner Giovanni are 6th-generation family owners. They are proud of the fact that the company is and always has been in the vibrant city center of Asti, rather than relocating to the more-convenient suburban industrial areas.

Davide, next to a candy case that their traveling salesmen used in the early 1900s.

A torrone box from the early 1900s.

D. Barbero is most famous for the production of artisanal torrone, a light, crumbly sweet that’s been popular in Italy for literally thousands of years – the Romans had a taste for it. D. Barbero’s version is packed full of excellent ingredients like a particular kind of local honey called Millefiori, real vanilla, Piedmont hazelnuts, and Bronte pistachios from Sicily. They have won many awards for it over the last 100 years or so.

After we toured the little historical section of the building, where they have their medals and certificates and also candy machines from the early 1900s, we went upstairs to the production area.

This is the room where the torrone is made, and Davide introducing it to us. The air had a light aroma of honey and hazelnuts.

The torrone starts out as a fairly thin liquid, and then as it’s gently stirred by the torrone machines it gets thicker and thicker.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent room, the fresh nuts are shelled, roasted, skinned, and then carefully checked for any bad ones. The nuts are then added to the gently-stirred torrone when it’s at the right consistency. The batch they were making that morning was with hazelnuts rather than pistachios:

Once the nuts have been added and the final consistency is reached, they remove the torrone using wooden paddles, lightly shape it, press and roll it into wooden trays, let it harden, and slice and package it. (Our tour was hands-on at this point – we got to help press a batch into the wooden trays.)

Then we went down to their shop, and tasted many of their products. I had never tried torrone before, and loved the light, crunchy texture and delicate honey and nut flavor.

Davide cutting up samples for us in the shop.

Samples of the torrone, as well as their chocolate-covered grissini (breadsticks) and gianduja (chocolate-hazenut) candies. Yum!