The oil according… Gennarino Esposito 7 Febbraio 2014 – Posted in: . ENGLISH TEXT

The testimony of Gennaro Esposito chef of the restaurant Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense in the bookguide The Land of Olive Oil 2014.

The Land of Olive Oil 2014 (Fausto Borella)

Gennarino Esposito

“I am a child of agriculture and during the olive harvest I often searched for my mother to help her. All this took place in a climate of great celebration. At the end of the day, my uncle chose the best olives. He was a man who thought outside of the box, very observant, preferring quality instead of quantity produced. Other olive growers in the town gathered at the café to talk about who had produced more oil. It was important to him to get it right. In fact, he never went to the café. The taste of good oil is always in my taste memory. I am particularly demanding and sensitive, and I have very good references. Personally, I adore impetuous oils, with an innate charm and elegance in the olive variety. I think the client adapts to the quality that is proposed. If no one ever explains anything, the client will never evolve. We should all say what we do and what we offer in a transparent manner, so as to push the client to become curious and, consequently, to become an enthusiast. Over the past 15 years, we have understood that there was no sense in producing low quality oil so, slowly, the production mentality changed. Oil offers food for thought. Sometimes, when you taste an oil you feel like making a dish. A bottle of good oil cannot cost less than 5 or 6 Euro per litre because of all the work that lies behind its production. It’s useless to use a lot of badly produced oil. Let’s use it in abundance to taste all its peculiarities. All this starts at home. We can create culture, and organize ourselves to explain why to our clients. The real numbers come from our homes, schools, and cafeterias. That’s where we must begin the educational path to avoid that our children eat poor oils, small daily doses of something that resembles oil but isn’t fit for good health”.