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publickman

Olive report from Paso Robles

Lars
9 years ago

We ended up going to four different olive companies for tasting. We started with a tour west of town - first to Mt. Olive Organic Farm, which was our least favorite. They did have a variety of olives and tapenades to taste, as well as several types of olive oil and vinegar - none of which impressed me. We did buy one bottle of olives there, however, but the oils were rather bland. Then we went to Pasolivo, which was further down the road (on Sunday), and they had a much better selection of oils. I had ordered oil from them before that I liked, but they also had flavored salts that I wanted to try. The truffle salt was especially impressive, and so I bought some of that along with three cans of oil, one of which was a basil oil that had a wonderfully fresh and intense basil flavor. It was like eating fresh basil, and I can see many uses for this oil, for times when I do not have basil in my yard, which would be mostly early spring or late winter. We also signed up for their club, which gave us a 20% discount on our purchase, but requires us to accept two shipments a year, which I do not think that will be a problem. I also bought some olive wood carvings, and so it was good to get the discount of those as well. The olive wood carvings were imported, however.

Monday we started our tour on the East side of Hwy 101 and went to Olivas de Oro, which rivaled Pasolivo and made me almost wish I had postponed joining their club, but it did give us a 20% discount. I bought olives, another oil, and a gift sampling there, and will consider ordering from them in the future. Because the road to their location was under construction, we decided to go back to town a different way and toured the East side wineries that afternoon, but that's another story and possibly not cooking related. When we got back to town, we went to We Olive and did some more tastings, and I bought yet another olive oil and a Muffaletta spead, which was interesting because it was made with artichokes, and I thought that if I bought this spread, I would be able to reproduce it, since it lists all the ingredients.

We loved the restaurants we went to and all in all had a great trip. On the way back, we stopped in Pismo Beach for clam chowder and visited Dinosaur Caves Park to take photos. I also took photos of downtown Pismo Beach and the pier. On the drive up, we did stop in Solvang for breakfast, and as I was getting out of the truck to go to the restaurant, we got a call from our sister, who wanted to know if we had felt the Napa quake that morning, and that was the first we had heard about it. We went to the Belgian Cafe, which had very good French Toast.

I'll give more details later.

Lars

Dinosaur Caves Park - Pismo Beach (NW end)

This post was edited by publickman on Sun, Aug 31, 14 at 15:53

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