Mobile Milling: Origins of Fresh "Olive Truck" California Olive Oil
“If you grow your own olives you take them to the mill in the town and you just wait next to others. You have a freshly baked loaf of bread wrapped in newspaper, and when you have your oil coming from the centrifuge, you break the bread that’s still hot from the bakery, you put a glass under the spout to catch the unfiltered emerald-green olive oil, and you distribute to the people. It’s like sharing the harvest of joy.”
- Samir Bayraktar, Olive Truck
Samir Bayraktar grew up eating table olives as part of his Turkish breakfast, lunch and dinner. As a young entrepreneur researching his country’s agricultural products for his company, Nar Gourmet (in Turkish the word “nar” means “pomegranate” and is also an acronym for “natural and regional”), Bayraktar was not at all surprised to learn that Turkey is a major producer, consumer and exporter of table olives, harvested mostly from newly planted olive cultivars chosen for suitability to curing.
His 2007 travels took him into Turkish orchards where productive trees—many estimated to be 500 to 2,000 years old—were being torn out (or, at best, neglected) because they weren’t the varieties needed for table olives. These distinctive olive oil–producing cultivars were descendants from the cradle of the olive’s cultivation in the country’s southeastern Anatolia region, producing olive oils for food, lamp oil and other cultural uses. Alluding to the disruption brought on by Middle Eastern geopolitics, Bayraktar saw the people and cultures who once preserved these groves and cultivated olive oils had been lost.
“I was in a city called Mardin in the southeastern part of Turkey. It’s in the area between two rivers that we call Mesopotamia, one of the oldest civilization [centers] in the region,” he says. “I saw a beautiful church surrounded by beautiful old olive trees and there’s no oil production. I didn’t see any mill out there. I saw a couple of stone mill parts but not any proper mill.”
Even olives harvested from the old trees in Mardin would require an eight-hour journey to find an olive oil mill. That’s a problem because, once picked, olives deteriorate quickly. “You cannot make great olive oil if you travel this long,” he adds. And that’s when the idea of a mobile olive-milling facility came into view. “If we have a chance to go there with something unique, like a mobile facility, maybe we could do some great olive oil on site, and this could be something like a movement, and then people could protect their varietals.” Bayraktar went to work to create a “mill on wheels.”
Designing the initial mobile olive oil mill started as a research project with university and government support, and consultations from top olive mill design experts in Italy with the aim of creating “the best conditions possible.” The mobility allowed Bayraktar to begin “chasing olives,” as he searched out fruit to make oils that reveal the unique flavors of cultivars specific to many regions of Turkey. On-site milling let him cut the time from tree to bottle, improving quality and earning his olive oils many prestigious awards.
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And learn more about olio nuovo in the Bay Area in our California Olio Nuovo Guide.
This article was originally published as Sharing a Harvest of Joy by Cheryl Angelina Koehler for Edible East Bay and published with permission in Edible Silicon Valley Issue #33.
