Olive oil should never smell bad. Even adulterated blends shouldn’t smell ‘awful’. First, it’s probably rancid or something. Is it way past the expiry date? Assuming it has any olive oil in it, note that olive oil doesn’t last that long (a year or 1.5 years in cool dark conditions). Second, it could be 100% pure (although we already doubt this, right?) and still be downright bad quality. Bad quality olives, harvested at the wrong time, left to ferment before pressing, pressed too many times, stored in overly warm conditions, light-struck, and then sold past its due date – you get the picture.
You get what you pay for, usually, so if you’re paying less than about NT$475/liter, you’re probably not getting decent olive oil; you can get Bertoli in most supermarkets here for about that. Back home Bertoli produces different grades but here I think I’ve only seen one grade. Or was that Berio? Now I’m confused. If I buy any at a Wellcome supermarket, that’s what I get for cooking and salads. Anything pricier than that is above my budget (even though I know it would be nicer for salads, bruschetta and hummus), and anything below that is suspect.
The stuff at Costco under the Kirkland brand is “pure olive oil” but that doesn’t necessarily mean good quality. In fact, from what I’ve read online today, that label often means it’s inferior (albeit real). It’s blended from ‘refined’ olive oil plus ‘virgin’ olive oil. Refined means 3rd or later repressings, sometimes treated chemically to get the last bits of oil out, so that’s the worst ‘real’ oil, in terms of flavor. And virgin is already the 2nd grade (not commonly sold alone, but usually listed as a blended ingredient). So Costco’s is cheap (what, about NT$850 for 5 liters – anyone remember?) and probably more reliable than local stuff in terms of being real, but it’s very low quality in terms of flavor. My thinking is that if you want to fry your chicken in an inch or two of oil and you want to use real olive oil, but can’t afford to use good stuff for that kind of frying, then this is an okay bet, but if you can afford better, definitely buy better. Just remember that you’d better keep it out of the light and use it within a year or it will go bad. Five liters is a lot, so if you get one of those, you might need to be using it as your only cooking oil in order to use it before it goes rancid. (Yes, oils, including those in nuts, really do go rancid, especially in Taiwan’s summer heat.)
EDIT: On the other hand, Berio’s pure olive oil is a decent oil for daily use, and it’s in the same category as Kirklands (blended virgin plus refined). But I imagine Berio uses more and better quality virgin in theirs than the Costco stuff does. I’ll definitely have to do a taste test on this one!
