Tasting

The Spanish verb catar means “to taste.”  But the meaning is quite precise; it is more serious and intentional than probar, which means “to try.”  If you wanted a bite of your companion’s dessert, for example, you might say: “Puedo probar tu postre?”  (Can I try your dessert?) But if you wanted to figure out if you wanted one or another rioja in a restaurant, you might ask: “Puedo catar los dos?” (May I try both?)

I have been doing a lot of tasting lately, the catar kind of tasting.  Yesterday I went to an olive oil tasting conducted by a woman named Ana Maria who has a shop in the Santa Caterina market.  As I have traveled farther down this tasting road, I’ve found that there are two types of people who care about the provenance of their food.  The first group consists of people who tend to be educated, worldly, and have enough disposable income to spend on more exclusive food products.  The people in this group--the foodies--purchase their way in.  The other group lives closer to the land and its products.  They often grow up in families and in regions where materia prima is key.  Terroir is in their blood.  Many make their living by growing or making one of these products, or using these products to make another—buying local fruit to make jam, for example.  I belong to the former group but am drawn to people in the latter.  Ana Maria is one of these.  A heavyset woman with glasses, she arrived at the tasting rolling her shopping cart behind her.  She unpacked five bottles of oil, her notebook and a couple of books from the cart, and began.

We tasted five oils—the maximum one can taste without becoming unable to distinguish the differences between them.  It turns out that Spain makes more olive oil than any other country, but has less success in exporting it than has Italy.  Many years ago, some producers were found to be tampering with the oil—one person died and several more were disfigured.  Needless to say, this incident caused the exporters to back away.

We started with two Catalan oils—these tend to be softer and less intense than those from other regions.  Which makes sense given that Catalan food is quite strong and more complex—sauces are more common here than in other parts of Spain. Regions that have simpler food—grilled vegetables, fried fish—can handle a stronger oil.  So a regional cuisine develops out of the local products—the taste of the olive oil, the local fish, the vegetables that grow best there.  And the wine that is produced locally tends to complement the cuisine best.

My favorite was one called Portico de la Villa, which is made from a blend of picuda and oji blanca olives. It’s been named one of the 20 best olive oils in the world and, during its production, there is never more than five hours between harvesting the olives and pressing their juice.

After the tasting, I chatted with Ana Maria, and told her I was researching slow cities.  She invited me to visit her shop, to see the slow food snail sticker that graces her door.  I’ll go to see her next week.