How To Make Olive Oil
While staying with George and Teresa in Lebanon I got to take part in an annual event for them, a very important day: taking the garden’s olives and pressing them into oil.
Nothing is wasted in the process. The seeds are ground and sold to be used as an accelerant when starting barbecues or fires. Oil that isn’t pure enough is turned into soap. Who knew that learning how to make olive oil would be so fun?
Here we go:
I wasn’t there for the collection part of this task, but olives are collected in huge sacks.
Collect The Olives
Pack the sacks in the car.
Pack Them In The Car
Dump them into the filtering machine. It removes leaves and stems.
Pour Them Into Filtering Machine
Pause For A Picture
A Guy At The Factory Wanted His Picture Taken With Me
Olives are then cleaned.
Stemless And Clean Olives Come Out
Next they are ground.
Grind The Olives
Seeds are ground and spit out.
Spit Out The Seeds
The olive sludge is pressed into oil.
Pressed Into Oil
The oil is collected.
Collect The Oil
And 280kg/616lbs of olives gets turned into 50L/13gallons of olive oil.
Success!
A Great Yield
The Whole Factory
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
[…] She asked me what I did in Lebanon for a month. I wondered if this was a test or trick question. I was only there for 8 days so I don’t know why she said a month. I told her I was only there for a week. She looked again and realized she made a mistake, thinking the stamp immediately beside the Lebanon entry stamp was its exit stamp. It wasn’t though. Still. I had to explain that I visited a friend from my business school, that I went to the monastery of St. Charabel and other monasteries, to Byblos (the Phoenician capital city), and I even helped my friend’s dad take his olives to get pressed into olive oil. […]
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