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After harvesting, preferably by hand, olives are placed in aerated crates away from heat sources, and its processing takes place within twenty-four hours. The pressing or milling is carried out with machines such as millstones (or grindstones) or cylinder and hammer crusher. The pressing with grindstones is the classic method and, in our opinion, the best one because it avoids olive paste from heating, this is obtained as a result of this process. In fact, temperature must not exceed 27° and the processing period in grinding mills should be about 30 minutes. The most modern crushers complete the process in one minute, precisely to avoid rising temperatures.
From the milling we pass to kneading, where oil is separated from water, by promoting the aggregation of oil drops. Temperature must stay below 27° in order to keep the characteristics of extra virgin olive oil intact and the processing lasts an average of thirty minutes.
At this point, oil is extracted from the oil paste. There are three systems: by pressure, by percolation or by centrifugation. Today, in the pressure system hydraulic presses are used because they develop about 400 atmospheres on overlapped synthetic fibre diaphragms (“fiscoli”), and between them the olive paste is deposited. The percolation, instead, consists in the separation through stainless steel slats. Although this system extends the extraction time, the extra virgin olive oil obtained has superior organoleptic characteristics. Finally, centrifugation is a continuous processing system that saves on water consumption and labour, but the extracted olive oil has a lower presence in polyphenols and phenols than the quantities found with other extraction systems.
The specifications for the production of PDO EVO OIL (extra virgin olive oil with protected designation of origin) provide for certain restrictive rules on the use of techniques for the cultivation and harvesting of olives, preferring traditional methods for the production of extra virgin olive oil and fixing the varieties of cultivars that must necessarily be autochthonous and specific to a territory.