KITCHEN NOTES · FIVE WAYS TO USE OIL LIKE THIS
A bottle of high-polyphenol early-harvest Koroneiki is a distinct ingredient from the olive oil most Americans keep in a cupboard. Calling it finishing oil or dipping oil undersells it. It is a table ingredient that does what a good cut of butter or a spoonful of honey does — it shows up at the end of a dish and changes how the dish tastes.
What follows are five uses, in increasing complexity, that are worth knowing for a bottle like ours. None of them require heat. Several of them are the way a Greek kitchen would use the oil anyway.
1. On torn bread
Tear a piece from a good crusty loaf — white sourdough, a whole-wheat country loaf, a sesame-crusted koulouri. Pour a thin pool of oil onto a plate, sprinkle flake salt on the surface, and drag the bread through. That is the whole of it.
This is the test. It is how any Greek family evaluates a new year’s oil at the kitchen table on bottling day. The oil is unaccompanied; its job is to be its own subject. If the oil on the plate tastes of green fruit, with a back-of-throat pepper that makes you cough once, you have a fresh early-harvest Koroneiki. If it tastes of nothing very specific, you have an oil that was picked late or has been sitting too long.
It is also the cheapest dinner we serve our own children. Bread, oil, salt, a glass of cold water. It is perfect for them.
2. Over feta, with oregano
A block of Greek feta, ideally one packed in brine rather than a dry barrel feta, goes on a plate. Drizzle oil generously — not a thin line, a ten-second pour — until the block sits in a shallow pool. Crumble dried Greek oregano across the top; a pinch of cracked black pepper.
This is the psistaria appetizer. It is on the table at every Greek grill house south of Mount Olympus and most north of it. It is, crucially, not a cheese-and-olive-oil combination that uses indifferent oil to stretch indifferent cheese. It is a combination in which a high-polyphenol Koroneiki plays against the salinity of the feta — the bitter and the pungent finding the salty in a way that is the closest thing Greek cooking has to a martini.
Serve with a cold retsina or, if you cannot find retsina, a bright assyrtiko from Santorini.
3. Into a lemon vinaigrette, dressed cold
For four people’s worth of salad:
- 4 tablespoons Maniatis Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- Juice of half a lemon (about 1½ tablespoons)
- ½ teaspoon flake salt
- Optional: ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard (for emulsion)
- Cracked black pepper
Whisk in a small bowl until clouded; the acid will pull the oil into a translucent gold emulsion. Dress cool or room-temperature greens — little gem, a mix of bitter leaves, a tomato salad with raw onion. Do not heat; the vinaigrette is raw.
The high-polyphenol profile of an early-harvest Greek oil is perfectly countered by citrus. The bitterness of the oil and the acid of the lemon are the same note — they are the freshness of a green thing — and they reinforce each other on the plate.
4. Stirred into warm things at the end
Do not cook with this oil. A high-polyphenol extra virgin loses its polyphenols to heat — that is why early-harvest oil has a lower smoke point, and why the oils you find in a commercial kitchen’s sauté line are almost always later-harvest or refined.
But stir it in at the end. After a lentil soup has finished cooking, drizzle a tablespoon into each bowl at the table. After a slow-braised lamb comes off the heat, finish it with a glossy ribbon. On boiled Greek-style green beans (fasolakia), off the pot and into a warm platter, a final four-tablespoon stream, a squeeze of lemon, flake salt.
The heat of the dish warms the oil’s aromatics without cooking them. The kitchen smells briefly of fresh-cut grass. This is the single most undervalued use of a fresh-pressed Mediterranean oil in American cooking, and it is what every Greek grandmother does without thinking.
5. In a frying pan, reluctantly
You will, occasionally, cook with a bottle of this oil, because the bottle is on your counter and the recipe calls for olive oil and you are not going to dig out a second bottle. That is fine. We do it too.
But: the specific thing to know is that high-polyphenol oils have a lower smoke point than refined ones, which means they burn sooner and taste bitter if overheated. Keep the pan at medium-low for a long-cook (softening onions, a slow egg), not medium-high for a sear. For searing, use a less delicate oil — a later-harvest Kalamata oil, a grapeseed, or (if you are Greek and unapologetic) a plain olive oil from a larger bottle kept behind the stove.
For everything else, finish the dish with our oil off the heat.
One general rule
The rule is simple: our oil does its best work raw. Every other use is a compromise with convenience, and the compromise is usually worth making. But if you have a fresh bottle on the counter and you want to know why it costs what it costs, tear a piece of bread and pour a pool on a plate and salt the surface. It will answer for itself.
— from the Maniatis kitchen