It wasn’t so long ago that the biggest decision I faced about oil was: Pennzoil or Quaker State? Then America transitioned from the Midwest State Fair Diet (deep-fried butter on a stick) to the Mediterranean Diet (baba ganoush on pita). From KFC to EVOO. Greek to you? Then you haven’t fully transitioned.
Welcome to the dizzying world of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Now I must choose between robust (for salads and marinades), bold (for dipping and drizzling), and smooth (for sautéing and stir-frying). All these options and many more are offered by Pompeian, the No. 1 brand of olive oil in the United States and my favorite because it’s named for a place buried under ash and pumice from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Very cool.
The explosion of choices has thrown me into an existential culinary crisis. What exactly is the difference between “bold” and “robust”? What happens if, God forbid, I accidentally use an oil to sauté that’s meant for drizzling and dipping? Will it blow up in my face?
I grew up in a home where the only cooking oil was Mazola. “You call it corn, we call it maize,” said a Native American woman in a 1970s commercial for the iconic margarine. If you’d said to me “olive oil,” I’d think you meant Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend. (I’m not going to speculate if she’s a EVOO.)
Olive Oyl—I mean olive oil—didn’t become popular in the U.S. until the 1990s with the advent of the Mediterranean Diet, helped along by K. Dun Gifford, a politician/businessman who began a nonprofit organization to promote healthy eating.
Gifford paid health experts and celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay to visit the Mediterranean, where olive oil has been in common use since the Roman Empire. (So be careful not to grab a bottle of imported Italian oil marked “Use by 11/27/1095.”)
From the 1970s to the 2020s, olive oil consumption in the U.S. grew by 1,330 percent, according to the USDA. Now it’s all the rage, gone viral. We have the North American Olive Oil Association, the Olive Wellness Institute and a trade magazine, the Olive Oil Times. There are even olive oil sommeliers, some of whom are certified by the National Organization of Olive Oil Tasters in Italy.
Jeffrey Schrader and Bryan Behling left corporate jobs in 2009 and opened The Spice & Tea Exchange on Park Avenue. They sold the store after three years and opened The Ancient Olive Gourmet in 2015, just as olive oil mania was cresting and shops were popping up across America. Their establishment was among the first hundred or so, says Schrader.
“Five years later the market was saturated,” he adds. “At the peak, there were 1,800 to 2,000 stores. That didn’t last because a lot of the owners weren’t retailers and treated their businesses more as a hobby than a real job. There are probably not more than 500 now.”
In addition to its Park Avenue location, The Ancient Olive has stores in Winter Garden, St. Augustine and The Villages. A Sarasota outpost was destroyed by back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024. At one point, notes Schrader, The Ancient Olive was the third-largest buyer of bulk olive oil and balsamic vinegar in North America.
EVOO literacy in the U.S. is a work in progress. That was evident at a recent tasting/tutorial hosted by local sommelier Sarah Santa in The Ancient Olive’s lovely courtyard tucked inside the Hidden Garden. “Every olive has its own story,” she told the dozen or so attendees. Elite EVOO, she added, leaves “a little burning pungency in the back of the throat.”
Santa’s offerings featured items like “Tuscan Kale Dumpling paired with Neapolitan Herb Balsamic and Frantoio Extra Virgin Olive Oil.” Other bites were served with oils enhanced by roasted onion and clementine oranges. Those were just a few of the more than 30 flavors that the shop offers, including everything from lemon to bacon to black truffle.
And I was melting down over robust vs. bold? I asked Schrader to rate customer olive oil knowledge on a scale of 1 to10—1 meaning that you’ve had lunch at the Italian pavilion at Epcot, 10 meaning that you grew up on an olive-tree farm in Tuscany. “About 5 to 7,” said Schrader. “When we opened, about 2 ½ to 3.”
I was at 2 or 3 when I began buying olive oil, grabbing anything BOGO. If I did stop to read a label, I figured “extra virgin” was a marketing term as meaningless as “new and improved” on a box of detergent. But that’s not the case.
This vaguely naughty-sounding designation, as foodies already knew, describes a product that meets exacting standards related to acidity levels, extraction methods and an assortment of organoleptic (sensory) measures. It’s the tête de cuvée, if you will, of olive oil.
After the tasting, I chatted with customers in the shop and was happy to encounter other equally clueless EVOO newbies. A shopper named Patti, for example, told me that EVOO is now her go-to for daily use, then lowered her voice and added: “Don’t put this down, but I have corn oil to bake with.”
I put it down anyway. Then I asked Patti what makes EVOO special. “I don’t know,” she said. “But Ina Garten cooks with it, and Rachael Ray uses it, too.” (I’m guessing that would earn Patti a ranking of about 5 on the Jeffrey Scale.) Angela, another shopper, considered EVOO to be an overdue indulgence. “We began using more olive oil in the last 10 years,” she said. “Once our children left we could afford finer things.”
Speaking of which, at The Ancient Olive a 375-milliliter bottle (about 12.7 ounces) of bacon-flavored EVOO is $21.95. The same size in truffle oil is $38 to $40. Yeah, it’s a bit pricey. But, hey, you deserve it after slumming through parenthood with store brands and other run-of-the-mill cooking oils.
The Ancient Olive is working to raise the community’s collective EVOO IQ with events like the tasting/tutorial and a lunch-and-learn for employees of the City of Winter Park. And, for the past five years, it has donated EVOO to the Winter Park Day Nursery.
That’s because olive oil is considered one of the healthiest fats, primarily due to its high concentration of monounsaturated fatty acids and powerful antioxidants. Eating food prepared with EVOO, says Schrader, “helps to make up deficits for kids who don’t have full exposure to nutritional diets at home.”
I told Schrader how trying to differentiate and choose between robust and bold left me paralyzed, like a platform diver at the end of the board afraid to take the plunge. “They can be used interchangeably,” he assured me.
Whew! If only I’d known. Oh well. This frees me up to learn the difference between black truffle and white truffle, Milanese gremolata and coratina, pizzaiola classic and … pass the Mazola!