October 2009: We rented a car and drove the two hours to a village in the northern Galilee and went with the owner of the oil press to his olive orchard. His sons were already there working to down the olives with a clever aparatus that doesn't harm the tree.

This has not been a good year for the olive crop, apparently world-wide. There's a great scarcity. Rajan says there wasn't enough pollination hence the small yields this year, which means the price skyrocketed.

We helped out a little in the orchard. You can see me helping to clear away the leaves and twigs and Mike helping with the mats. Unfortunately we had to make great haste when a huge cloud threatened to dump rain on the already downed olives.
Back at the processing plant, the olives go into a hopper, up a conveyor belt to the washing tub, then they roll out and into another hopper, ready for the crusher.

The pulp is separated from the pits. There's a lot of technical stuff including water temperature having to be at 38 C or below. In order to heat the water Rajan has a special water heater that is actually fueled by the dry olive pulp from last year.

The pulp is measured automatically and feeds the fire that warms the water that is used in the centrifugal force gadgetry. This is what separates the oil from the soupy pulp and the discarded pits etc. That pulp is fed through another tube and sent to a big pile outside. It is also sold for home uses as fuel, for animal feed, and other uses.

Meanwhile the oil and water are being separated, too, and "magically," this lovely greenish yellowish oil comes out and into our gerrycan and is weighed to 16 kgs.

Once home, we put it into glass bottles for storage in the basement for another year of delicious usage. That same night we had a wonderful salad with the new olive oil to dress it!! We couldn't believe it -- only several hours earlier, we were touching the olives that made that very oil!