This is an archived edition of our Field Report email newsletter. You can sign up at the bottom of the page!
Greetings from Fat Gold:
The harvest begins! Here are the very first olives from the very first day of our 2024 milling season:
And here’s the very first oil from those very first olives:
That’s arbequina, destined for Fat Gold Blue.
For more glimpses of the process—and probably too many glamour shots of fresh oil—take a peek at our Instagram stories. This is our big moment… we do all of our posting for the year in the next couple of weeks.
We have a new offering in the works.
Established customers will recall that, during the holidays, we offer a gift set, which includes
- one tin of bold and peppery Fat Gold Standard,
- one tin of fruity and floral Fat Gold Blue, and
- one copy of our special 32-page zine, titled HOW TO USE IT UP.
It looks like this…
…and it’s a tidy package: attractive, delicious, AND informative.
This year, for the first time, the gift set will feature our freshest, newly-made olive oil. Getting this oil not just milled but packaged takes a bit of extra hustle for a three-person team, so: we are hustling! It’s just too much fun to give (and receive) olive oil that’s as fresh as it can possibly be.
We’re calling it the Super Fresh Gift Set to reflect this change.
The plan is to release this in mid-November, and if you’re receiving this Field Report, you’ll be the first to hear about it. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, annual subscriptions purchased now will begin with our December batch. These make a great gift. How do we know? By the number of gift recipients who, after their gift has run its course, come back to purchase their own ongoing subscription. It’s remarkable.
One last thing: if you’re in the early stages of planning a corporate gift, and you’re interested in giving either annual subscriptions or Super Fresh Gift Sets, now’s the time to get in touch. You can email robin@fat.gold, or simply reply to this message.
(We sent a version of the following explainer to our annual subscribers, in the printed zine that accompanied our September batch, and we thought it was interesting enough to include here, too. Zine readers: you will note a promising update…)
We have misled you! All these years, we’ve claimed Fat Gold is a producer of extra virgin olive oil. That’s true… but, if we measure by mass, olive oil is not our primary output. Just like every other olive oil producer on the planet, we mostly make pomace.
What’s pomace? It’s a byproduct of olive oil production. In the mill, olives are crushed into a smooth paste: a mixture of skin, flesh, water, and oil, along with the smashed-up pits. After we separate the oil from that mixture, the remainder is called pomace.
How much is produced? Olives are, at best, 20% oil by weight. So, if we send a ton of olives through the mill, we get perhaps 30-40 gallons of oil… and more than 1,500 pounds of pomace. Yikes!
Does it… taste good? Pomace looks like olive tapenade, so it’s tempting to imagine it might make a tasty appetizer. Unfortunately, like raw olives themselves, pomace is totally bitter and astringent.
What do you do with it?? Pomace management is a challenge for olive oil makers of all sizes, and California’s infrastructure for this stuff is way behind Europe’s. In the past, our pomace has gone mainly toward animal feed—for dairy cows, for example.
But other possibilities abound! There are experiments underway to extract the biophenols still abundant in pomace and use them for health and beauty products. In Europe, some producers dry out the pomace, then use the woody shards of olive pit as fuel pellets. In Australia, they fold pomace into asphalt for roads, apparently making it sturdier and more crack-resistant.
And here’s some promising news: this year, for the first time, Fat Gold’s pomace is going back out into the groves, to feed the soil.
Why are you telling me about this stuff? In craft food production, it’s tempting to focus only on the parts of the process that are pretty, appetizing, even a bit romantic. For us, it’s a matter of respect for our customers and supporters—that’s you—that we talk about the entire production process clearly and frankly.
That production process is now underway, in a big way!
We’ll be running the Fat Gold mill for the next three weeks, with olives rolling in from all up and down the San Joaquin Valley. If the 2023 milling season was our shakedown cruise, this year is when we really see what the dream machine can do.
Thanks: to all of you subscribing, all of you who have purchased tins, all of you who stock us on your shelves, and all of you just following along. Your support makes this work possible.
–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan