Just made some sauce for dinner, and opened up a new bottle of olive oil for it. After finishing the sauce, I noticed that the olive oil bottle contains numerous tiny whitish/translucent blobs, each one maybe 2mm across. Most of these are stuck to the glass, but some are suspended in the oil. They don’t look like mold, they look like solid fat globules, which strikes me as odd for olive oil. I’ve never seen this before; we have two other bottles of the same brand (Enzo’s Table) on the shelf, and they don’t have these globs in them.
The oil smells fine when poured out into a saucer, but I haven’t tried tasting it yet.
What’s the deal? Is this a “once in a while this happens because of *** and it’s OK,” or do I need to discard my sauce and start over with a new bottle of olive oil?
The bottle in question had been stored in the basement (~65F) until I brought it up to the kitchen (~77F). This is the first time we’ve seen this phenomenon, though I now understand that some olives have a greater wax content than others, and so some bottles of oil may exhibit this behavior while others at the same temps may not. Depending on how fast the oil cools (and to what temp), the wax may solidify as blobs (like we had), or hazy translucent swirls throughout the oil. No harm, no foul.
Wife was still a little squicked out by it, so we took it back to the store. By the time we got there a good portion of the blobs had disappeared as the bottle had warmed up, but there were enough left that the clerk didn’t have any hesitation about accepting it for return.
Interesting! I wonder if there’s more to it than just wax content. I’ve noticed that sometimes a vinaigrette would solidify in the fridge, while the same olive oil that went into the vinaigrette would remain perfectly clear and liquid in the same fridge.
(I don’t normally keep olive oil in the fridge, I just put it there as an experiment.)
In my experience, putting olive oil in the fridge results in a bottle of greenish sludge, which becomes oil again at room temperature. It may depend on the olive oil.
In my grocery store i sell damaged/liquidated/close-dated grocery and general merchandise.
From autumn to early spring i have a huge amount of olive oil come in that contain settled white blobs in it. They simply got too cold at some point in their journey (not sure of specific temperature) but the olive oil is completely safe, and even acts the same way as normal oil when used in cooking.
