Drizzling good olive oil over perfectly ripe tomatoes and mopping it up with a crusty knob of bread is one of the greatest pleasures of summertime. Out of the dizzying variety of olive oil brands at your local supermarket, we wanted to find the ones that are actually worth buying.
After researching over 40 bottles of oil and speaking with a trained olive oil taster to help define our criteria, we tested 15 olive oils available at national grocery store chains across the country. We focused on those with printed harvest dates, which are the most reliable way to make sure your oil is fresh.
Our goal was to find good all-purpose extra-virgin olive oils that could be used for cooking which EVOO is great for , by the way but also for salad dressings and bread dipping. Here are the ones that stood out in our tests. Fragrant and grassy, this oil has a fair amount of pungency and a sharp bitterness our testers enjoyed. Pairs nicely with roasted vegetables, bread, and pasta. This oil starts with a slight caramel flavor, but a bitter pungency blooms followed by a pleasant piquancy.
The company also sells refills in recyclable aluminum cans. If you want to avoid storing the oil in plastic, you can buy the cans and transfer the oil to another container. I thought it smelled just like piles of freshly cut grass sitting out in the sun. Others detected notes of green apple, mint, citrus, and wintergreen leaves. Its bitterness was more mild than other oils we tasted, but it had a punchy, peppery finish.
We enjoyed its woody, grassy flavor and its mellow melon aftertaste. It has a much looser, silky consistency, which is kind of refreshing.
