288: Skyler Mapes

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. So when we do lead in-person tastings, we'll sometimes have like a tasting wheel in front of the customers so they can kind of go through and see what they taste. And we just let it be a really fun exploratory process without putting any pressure on them. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59How much do you know about olive oil? After this episode, probably a lot more. Skylar Mapes, co-founder of Exo Olive Oil and co-author of the new book, The Olive Oil Enthusiast, joined us from her home in Calabria, Italy to drop invaluable olive oil knowledge from harvest to bottle, plus Italy travel tips and more. It's a fun episode, and we hope you'll enjoy it.

1:28Skylar Mapes, this is Taste. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So I have to know, have you had olive oil today already? Yes, of course. Tell me about it. What'd you have? How was it eaten? So we had a vegetable broth because Giuseppe has been a little bit under the weather. And so I use the tutti as a finishing oil and we just had some really good soup. So tell me about what makes something a good finishing oil, because I'll admit that I think I use the same olive oil for everything. Okay, well, this is actually a big question, because it depends on what you're eating. So at Exal, we produce high quality extra virgin olive oil, which is good for both cooking and finishing.

2:08And today, like I said, I was using the Turi, which is produced with 100 % peralea olives, which are native to the region of Calabria. and I like to use it as a finishing oil on vegetables because it acts as a really good compliment for foods like zucchini and carrots and peas and those were all in the soup that we're eating today. So they just go really very well together. I love that. And I love that I have like an olive oil expert that I can barrage with questions today. And I guess to zoom out, I'm wondering like what was your olive oil consumption like before you moved to Italy? How did you interact with it?

2:42Oh my gosh, it's kind of embarrassing, honestly. Like just that she still laughs at me for our pre-exile days. So I was using a mix of olive oil and coconut oil. And I actually used to have like a half liter of olive oil from Trader Joe's in my bathroom because I would use it as a moisturizer. So I didn't really see olive oil as just a kitchen item, which is still true to this day. But I would say that I used it more as a moisturizer than in the kitchen as a cooking fat. So I didn't use it very much. Honestly, I love that. And there is a section in your book that is talking about olive oil as a beauty product.

3:26So that already makes more sense to me talking to you about it now. Was that your inspiration for like having that section? Absolutely. I think that olive oil as a makeup remover and as a moisturizer is so underrated. And it's incredibly, it's also a really good affordable option for folks that are looking for a product to last a little bit longer. I mean, you know, in comparison to your bottle of makeup remover or whatever type of like oil base cleanser, you can use a$30 bottle of olive oil, which is much bigger. it'll last longer and it probably has higher antioxidants. So in other words, if you're cooking with olive oil and you have some extra on your hands, just rub it into your hands or elbows or something.

4:16Correct. So before you were starting an olive oil business, what were you doing and then what inspired you to switch careers? I was working in the design industry, particularly the architecture and structure engineering industry. And I have a degree in architecture. I went to school for architecture and I love the design industry, but I was just feeling overly taxed in that field. And it felt like I was not going to be able to move forward creatively in the way that I wanted to. That felt authentic to myself. I didn't think that I had, I was going to be able to grow enough. And so I started looking for more creative outlets that led to me working in the wine industry with a friend who owns a winery and is a winemaker.

5:02and then eventually we pivoted and started working in olive oil because my husband and my business partner just said his family has worked in the olive oil industry for a number of years and they have olive trees and so it felt like a natural the next natural step in exploring okay how can I take my love for food and a creative process and make something beautiful out of it So where were you living before you moved to Calabria? And what was the transition like? We were living in the Bay Area. I'm from Oakland originally. So we were living in Oakland, and then we made a decision to move to Austin, Texas.

5:45And this was early 2020. So pre COVID, and nobody knew what COVID was yet. And so we moved from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas, We were there for a few months. And then guess what happens in March of 2020? Like, bam, COVID shows up. All of our events got canceled. We couldn't do anything in person, couldn't travel. And so we just decided, like, you know what, everything's canceled anyways. We have to get back to Italy for harvest. And so we made a decision to start spending longer amounts of time in Italy. And then did you come back to the States? I mean, eventually, maybe you've come back, but Italy is where you live now, right?

6:25Yeah, so we split our time between Austin and Calabria. Okay, so I have to ask, as a fellow Californian, what was the culture shock like moving from the U.S., from California to Italy? Were there any changes that maybe you were surprised about or weren't as expected? Yes, there were a lot of changes. But I think this also comes down to what part of Italy Calabria is located in. Oakland, where I'm from, is a big city and there's a lot of things happening and there's always, you know, activities and functions and parties and lots of museums. There's a lot of events and it feels very metropolitan.

7:08Calabria is countryside. There's, yes, of course, there are big cities, but it's farming country. The people here, a lot of them are farmers. They're growing corn and wheat and vineyards and olive trees. So that has been, and I think will always kind of be a big culture shock for me because when I was living in the Bay Area, I would go up to white country to Sonoma or Napa when I wanted to get out of the city. And now there's no need to do that because I'm already in the countryside. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm curious if you can tell me about what's special about Calabrian olive oil versus Sicilian or Tuscan or even like Californian olive oil.

7:51So like wine, olive oil has terroir, which is the influence of soil and weather and a cultivar kind of acclimating to the way that it's grown in a specific area. And in Calabria, that's especially true. the zone the coastal part of Calabria all the way over to Puglia and some parts of Sicily are known as Magna Grecia which means Great Greece and it's called Magna Grecia because a lot of the Greeks moved from Greece up to southern Italy and started settling in this part of the country in the 7th century BC and they brought with them a lot of different type of plants one of them of

8:37grown to be different types of cultivars, which the Carolea is one of the most famous in this region today. So the Carolea olive tree, although it was originally technically Greek, it has developed to be characteristically Calabrian. And if you include the terroir, that has a huge impact and influence on the way that that tree is grown here in this region. So in Sicily, you have Nacolara del Belece. In Puglia, you have Coratina, which is the most famous olive tree in that area. And then in Calabria, you have the Cadalea olive, which is the most commonly grown cultivar in this area. Gotcha. And if I was going to be, you know, maybe sipping these different olive oils off a spoon or just kind of tasting them, would there be like a main taste signifier for Calabrian olive oil?

9:32Yeah. So with the Catalea, you're going to get a lot of notes of like green apple, depending on where it's grown. Again, because terroir plays a huge influence depending on if it's grown in the Cretone zone or the Catanzaro zone of the region. But you can often find notes a green apple, sometimes green pepper, and also almond. If you're going to taste a roginella, which is a cultivar that's more grown in the mountains of Calabria, you'll often find notes of ripe purple olive, plum, and then on the nose, sometimes banana. Banana olive oil sounds crazy and not like something I've ever tried before.

10:15Do you feel like because you have the wine background, you're able to kind of isolate these tasting notes and engage in olive oil in that kind of way? Absolutely. I grew up running around wineries with my parents who, I will admit, were part of a lot of wine clubs. So I had, I feel like I spent a lot of time in wineries, which was really, really great for developing that background, that sommelier-esque background, which you need for olive oil. Yeah. I'm curious how you feel about, I feel like with wine and with olive oil and coffee and all of these different foods that have so much heritage and also so many nuances and tasting points within them.

11:00To me, it can be almost overwhelming when I look up like a bag of coffee and it says, oh, it'll have notes of toffee and chocolate and nuts and all of these things. And then when I drink it, to me, it tastes like delicious coffee, but maybe not any of those tasting notes. Like how do you approach talking to your customers about like what they should be experiencing when they open a bottle of your olive oil, as opposed to just letting them have that experience? I don't put any pressure on them. Like we need to stop expecting everyday consumers to have the same access to all of, to that well to that library to that mental library as some layers do it's just not going to happen so when we do lead in-person tastings we'll sometimes have like a tasting wheel in front of consumer in front of the customers and so they can kind of go through and see what they taste and we'll just let it be a really fun exploratory process without putting any pressure on them and see what they say some people will say oh my gosh i do taste banana or oh i do taste black pepper.

12:07I'll say, oh, this is reminiscent of something like a green that I've had before. And I feel it on the back of my throat. And then sometimes they're like, I taste strawberry. I'm like that. There's no strawberry. There's no strawberry in this. But we just, you know, let people explore and see what they taste. No pressure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm curious because you have this design background when it came to coming up with the bottles for your olive oil, how did you think about like what you wanted that experience to be? Because obviously like picking an oil off the shelf is a huge way that people are getting olive oil into their kitchens.

12:44So we actually just recently rebranded, but the original branding for XL, which is like that dark green label with the white writing vertical, which a lot of people associated XL with initially. I designed a label and my background I know the design and architecture industry definitely heavily influenced that because we wanted a nice, clean, modern label. Because, you know, when you walk down the olive oil shelf, you see all of these like just very similar olive leaf, olive-esque labels. And we wanted it to feel almost more like a wine label, if that makes sense, instead of in-your-face Greek or in-your-face Italian olive oily.

13:27we have since recently rebranded and the head that's at the top of our label is from our book the olive enthusiast um which we it's from an illustration in the book which we pulled from and then there is the background of one of our olive trees which was also pulled from our book so it has a lot of personal significance to us as well as making a nod to um the mania grecia world and And that kind of like Great Greece theme, which you can see today in Calabria. Yeah, I think it's so fun that you got to bring in elements of your book in that way, because the book is so lush and illustrated and beautiful.

14:12And I'm curious about the recipes in the book and how you went about developing them, because the book is a really cool mix of, you know, great information about buying olive oil and storing it and how it's grown. And then there are these kind of recipes as well. When you were putting the book together, did you come up with the recipes first or how did you kind of nail that component? So I always wanted to write a book and Giuseppe shared the same sentiment. So when 10 Speed reached out to write a book about olive oil, they asked if he wanted to include recipes. And we said yes, because we've actually been collecting recipes from Giuseppe's aunt and his mom for the past probably like four or five years.

14:52And so we already had a collection of recipes that we could pull from. And then we already had a list of recipes that we knew we wanted to write down and record. So the process was a mix of writing down and kind of editing some of the existing recipes that we had a good handle on. And then going back to Giuseppe Zia and his mom for the recipes that we really, really wanted to record. And then for the recipes like the waffles and the popcorn and the olive oil brownies. Those are all things. And also the semolina olive oil cake. Those are all things that I was making almost every, at least once a month during the pandemic.

15:30Like I swear during the pandemic, I was probably making olive oil brownies twice, like at least once or twice a week. It was ridiculous. I was like giving them out to people. I was just eating them out of the tray. These are things that we were eating all the time. and so it was easy like we need to put this in the book yeah I don't think it's ridiculous at all to be making olive oil brownies that often I wish I had someone in my life that was doing that so I could be eating them and I think it's so fun to hear about the recipes coming in part from your mother-in-law and like your Giuseppe's family because I follow you on Instagram and so I get to see these glimpses of the like lunches and dinners that they make for you which I'm just so jealous about.

16:12And I'm curious like what it's like to be eating so much like Southern Italian home cooking. Are there any staples that you find yourself eating often? My favorite dish that Giuseppe's mom makes is eggplant padmigiana. It is so perfect. It's so good. And the reason it's so good is because she uses a really great proportion of tomato sauce to fried eggplants to cheese. So it's not overly tomatoey, which I think is a mistake that a lot of people make. They put too much tomato sauce in. But if you pull back on the tomato sauce and then you move more deeply with the basil and the eggplant and the cheese, it creates a really beautiful creamy dish that is very, very, very vibrant without the tomato again being overpowering.

17:03Yeah, that sounds so great. And I think that a lot of people would eat eggplant parm in the winter as kind of a comfort food. But actually this time of year when we have these really beautiful late summer, early fall eggplant is kind of the perfect time, especially to be giving it more of that lighter treatment. So it sounds like Giuseppe's mom is maybe inspiring what I'll make for dinner soon. Yes. And the eggplants are smaller right now. And when they're smaller, they're sweeter. And so they add that extra sweetness to the dish. And oh my gosh, plus with like the late summer tomatoes, you just can't, you can't, you can't go wrong.

17:40And instead of mozzarella, she uses provolone, which is better because it's saltier and it doesn't release as much liquid as mozzarella. and people from Campania, from Naples will try and come at me for this, but I'm sorry. I think it's better with Prova Bonnet and I will die on that hill. Yeah. And you're just, you're defending like your family's way of doing it. So I feel like that's so Italian. And I love that. I have to try it with swapping out the cheese. I'm curious because, you know, you obviously live in Calabria, but you seem to be traveling all over Italy, or at least when you can. And I'm curious, like as an American in Italy, like what do you think, maybe where are some places you think Americans should be going that they're not going, or maybe some places that people do go that you think are overrated?

18:29The places that I think people visit too often or that are over touristy in Italy, it's not that they're not worth visiting, it's that they're not worth visiting in the peak of summer. So like going to Rome in July is an absolute nightmare. You won't catch me there. You will see me in Rome in January or February. I will not go to Venice any other month than like January or February because it's just too many people. So those cities and the same with Florence, those cities are absolutely beautiful, but there's no reason to visit a big city in Italy in the dead of summer. Anytime from like May to October, I don't think is a really ideal time to visit a big city in Italy, honestly, in my personal opinion.

19:20One of my favorite cities to visit is Lecce. I was just there. It was amazing. I had so much fun. And I think it's absolutely a place worth visiting. And I recommend going in like March or April in the spring when it's not too cold. It's not going to be over touristy. You're still visiting a city. So it's not too, you know, the weather is nice and there's still lots of things to do. But if you're going to also go to Puglia to go swimming, go in the summer. What are your favorite foods to eat in leche? Did you have any memorable meals on this past trip? I had so many memorable meals on this past trip and I'm going to try and describe them so Puglia Salento is a part of it's the southern part of Puglia it's known for the wine Primitivo which is like the granddaddy of Zinfandel which we consume in the U.S.

20:15and they make it as one restaurant Aceria 63 I think that's the name of it they make an orechete which is a pen pasta with primitivo okay so it's like a red orechete and it is so delicious and they also always have specials so i can't guarantee you know what the special is going to be next week but everything they make is delicious i had i also had this other a packety pasta with cream of cream potato sauce it was a really simple cream potato sauce so she didn't add any like butter or milk. It was very, very, very simple and light with octopus and fennel. And it was excellent. But if you go to Puglia, anything from the sea, any seafood is going to be amazing and fresh because there's just so much coast.

21:07There's not a lot of mountains. So I wouldn't recommend, I don't think it's a place where you go to eat, you know, or beef necessarily, unless you're more in Northern Puglia. But if I'm in Salad, I'm going to be eating seafood. but mussels, clams, shrimp, fish, octopus. Wow, that sounds so great. And I love thinking about the context of where you are in the country and what foods are most available and kind of letting that guide what you're eating. It seems like a really smart way to travel, like not just in Italy, but really anywhere you are in the same spirit of like not eating gas station sushi in the middle of the country, you know?

21:46Agreed. So because you're my resident olive oil expert today, I just want to fact check a couple quick things with you if that sounds cool. Sounds good. Okay, so I guess to start off, when I'm buying olive oil at the store, what are the few things that I should be looking for on the bottle to ensure that I'm getting something that's a good product? So first you want to look at the bottle and make sure that it is a dark bottle or a tin because we do not want the olive oil to be exposed to light. That is number one enemy. Next, you're going to look on the back of the label for a country or even better as a region of origin because you want the oil to be coming from one place.

22:31And I want to just make it super clear here. some people get hung up on like single point of origin it has to come from the same farm I do not agree with that because um for example one of our oils that we produce it comes from two farms but they're technically less than three kilometers away because it's a blend um and we have very small production so I think having the oil come from the same region and and buying from a smaller brand is top priority. The country of origin is very, very important. Next, you want to look for a harvest date. The most recent harvest date is going to be 2022. But Harvest 2023 is right around the corner.

23:17We're harvesting in like two weeks. So that new oil will be available in like January. And then you want to look for a lot number if they have it, just to ensure that can help provide some context of what part of property that oil came from. And then, yeah, that's pretty much it. You don't need a bottle date. That's not necessary. Harvest date takes precedent over a bottle date. Gotcha. And harvest is once a year in the fall. So if I'm looking at something in summer and it's from the previous fall, that actually is kind of the best option I could have. Exactly. So if it's, you know, summer 2024, you're going to be looking at harvest 2023.

24:02It was a year behind. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And I've always wondered that. And the other thing I've always wondered is this whole smoke point situation. Is it actually bad to be cooking with high quality olive oil at high heat? Should I be bringing in coconut oil or something else? No, it's not bad. I wish that I could single-handedly just squash this rumor. It's ridiculous. honestly. So basically, olive oil, we cannot tell what the smoke point is of olive oil, because we don't have labs in our house. When they do, like when scientists and smoke point tests for olive oil, they're doing it in a controlled environment and they're heating the oil up to a certain temperature and they're leaving it at that temperature until they can tell that it has hit its smoke point.

24:53That's a measurement that they take. You can't replicate that exact thing in your house unless you're a scientist and for some reason have all that equipment in your home. So when we see an oil like smoking or we see whitewood whist above it, that can be, it can be steam or vapors or other things kind of being released out of the oil, which is totally normal. But if you're heating a pan on high heat and you walk away, which you never ever should do, you shouldn't do it with canola oil, butter, peanut oil, and it starts smoking profusely, like you're about to have a kitchen fire, you should throw that oil out because you've obviously burnt the oil.

25:38This is not just with olive oil though. This is with all cooking oils because you've left it on the pan and walked away and could potentially have a kitchen fire. Does that make sense? Yeah, that seems like not the smart thing to do. So if you're deep frying, are you still using olive oil? Like, is there anything that you would not use olive oil for when you're cooking? We never really deep fry. We're more like pan fryers in this house for everything. It doesn't matter if it's chicken or fish or whatever. It's usually a pretty, like maybe i don't know three quarters of an inch of olive oil on a pan maximum maximum um but usually it's half inch of olive oil on a pan and then we're able to fry like zucchini fritters and fish calamari and we fry all of that in olive oil um because that is you know the typical southern italian frying oil at home but we're never worried about um a smoke point reaching the smoke point because we're frying probably at 325, 350 max, and we don't have any smoking happening.

26:47So don't worry about cooking with olive oil again, unless you're going to be trying to burn your house down. And one cool thing about extra virgin olive oil is that it actually helps to create a barrier around your food, especially if you're eating vegetables. and that can help the vegetable or whatever food that you're cooking retain more nutrients. Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like it makes sense you would use olive oil for everything. And I've honestly never had the experience of reaching some kind of crazy smoke point. I just think it's something that people are told about. And then I just like would avoid using olive oil entirely for certain things out of this latent fear that I don't even like really know what that means.

27:30So I feel empowered to just keep using my olive oil for everything now. I think that one of the best ways to kind of test this or to, if you're, if people are hesitant about using extra virgin olive oil or regular olive oil for cooking, one of the best things to do is just get a stainless steel pan, heat it on low, medium, low, add some olive oil, add some smashed garlic and a little bit of spicy pepper, and just let that heat on low or medium little heat for two to four minutes until the garlic is just very light, gentle, golden brown. So it's not burnt yet. And then add your sliced tomatoes in.

28:10And that is like the perfect way to ease into cooking with olive oil and make tomato sauce with basil, of course. Yeah, of course. How could you not? So to close out today, you know, this is taste and we ask guests about their tastes. So I have a little rapid fire like taste check for you. So I'll ask you some questions and then you can just tell me kind of the first thing that comes to mind, if that sounds good. Sounds good. Okay. Green olives or black olives? Green olives. Pizza or pasta? Pasta. Gelato or soft serve? Gelato. Most underrated piece of kitchen equipment? skinny tom they're supposed to be called tweezers but i like to call them skinny tons okay most underrated use for olive oil skincare skincare favorite cookbook my parents kitchen okay and then the american grocery store item that you miss the most it's not more of an item It's more like a accessibility thing.

29:18So having access to any type of cuisine at any time, but particularly being able to go into like a Ranch 99 or a Korean grocery store and just get a huge bucket of like kimchi. Yeah, I think I would miss that the most too. Skylar, this was so fun and I'm about to go put olive oil on absolutely everything. So thank you so much for coming by. Thank you for having me.

29:51What is up, Eliza? How are you? I'm pretty good, Matt. How are you? I'm great. We're going to talk about three things. Let's do it. What do you got? My first thing is I was up in upstate New York over the past weekend. Not quite by your place, so I would have showed up. I was in Livingston Manor, and I was there for a friend's birthday. and one of the jobs we were given on the way up was to pick up what I thought was the birthday cake, but it turned out that it was actually a birthday key lime pie, which is even better. And it was from a really good bakery in Livingston Manor called the Neon Croissant.