BS to downvote me for this comment. Cheap olive oil is counterfeit. Cheap milk, honey and coffee are adulterated with fillers. Cheap tumeric is colored with lead oxide
Not always. I've done the color test on a lot of cheap spices I get in the middle eastern stores I can go to and they've always passed the tests. Sometimes it's cheaper because you're not paying for it to be portioned into little glass jars and sold as an exotic, rare thing like it is in western european cuisine.
Olive oil should be used within a reasonably short time of opening, which makes Costco-sized bottles less practical. We buy honey and vanilla extract from Costco, but we don't use olive oil anywhere near fast enough to justify buying Costco-sized jugs.
My family makes a small batch of olive oil from a couple of big trees we have and have never gotten through what we make that fast, even though we use a lot. What's the problem in taking long to consume it? (Months)
I assume that the olive oil I buy in the store is very old compared to fresh-pressed oil. Similarly, my aunt has an avocado tree, and her fresh-picked avocados stay ripe for weeks, unlike the store-bought kind that have a sweet spot of ~36 hours.
Olive oil (and all cooking oils in general) are the opposite of wine - once bottled they start degrading and any additional exposure to air, light, heat degrades them further.
What degrades specifically? Usually it's the nuanced flavors and health benefits of good extra virgin, it'll usually be fine for cooking but you're losing out on the purposeful decision of using olive oil over vegetable oils (gross)
Olive oil is so much cheaper in bulk. Do you have any tips for how to preserve it? Intuitively, I would assume that re-bottling a large volume into several small bottles (and then keeping the extras sealed and in the dark) would be better than using a larger bottle continuously. Does that hold up to your experience?
If exposure to air is bad, it's possible that re-bottling wouldn't work well. I don't know if bottled olive oil is treated like many other packaged foods and sealed in with an inert(ish) gas, but I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case. I don't know how you could replicate that at home.
I can easily taste the difference between food cooked with olive oil and natural oils as long as it's a relatively mild dish with a limited number of flavors (which is the appropriate use case).
It's so weird to me when people act like neutral oil has no applications. Olive oil can be good without neutral oils having to be bad. They're just good for different things.
Not lead oxide, lead chromate. So you can get all the hexavalent chromium you could ever need. But by "cheap", I think you mean "the absolute dodgiest crap that mostly never even gets exported from Bangladesh".
Coffee beans are bin-sorted in a way where the good coffee gets better, and the lesser coffee gets worse.
The most-shapely and consistent beans go to the more-premium lines.
The small, underdeveloped, or misshapen beans (called "clinkers") go to the cheaper lines, along with the other defects. And so does the chaff from the coffee hulls, which is rolled up into weird little balls and thrown in too -- which is not done with premium coffees. The unavoidable portion of insect parts is higher in cheap coffee than it is in expensive coffee.
In an ideal world, all of the stuff that is removed from premium coffees would be used as compost or something.
But it is instead included in the lesser coffees, where it is consumed.
