Never Again

While the Jerusalem Center was being built, James E. Faust (part of the leadership of the Church who was very invested in the creation of the Center) requested that it not only be a place of learning on the inside but on the outside as well. Because of this, they placed three different olive presses on the grounds, as well as hundreds of olive trees. We were fortunate enough to pick the olives last week, and this afternoon we were able to crush the olives that we had picked to make olive oil.

The trees are beautiful. This particular tree is 500 years old and from the Galilee. It was transplanted at the Center in 1987 and as it was dying at the time, the landscaper (who still works for the Center) grafted other branches into the tree to heal it, and it worked. Brother Huntington told us this story and rather forcefully added that it was his favorite tree and we'd better not harm it or fall out of it while picking the olives. Yes, sir. Picking was quite enjoyable even while making sure not to harm the trees, it took 81 students plus four teachers and their wives and the five kids also here about two or three hours each day we picked (we only picked olives for two days) and I'm sure we still did not get them all off the trees. We got a little sticky, and there was a lot of tree climbing involved, but it was super fun. Some of the trees are huge; I sat on the shoulders of a guy in our group who is probably 6'2'' or 6'3'' and I still couldn't reach the top of the tree on which we were working. Of course, if I were taller it may have worked better.

We learned today from one of our professors that there are five steps to olive oil making: 1) Gather olives. Check. 2) Separate the olives for pickling and for oil. In biblical times each family would have had an olive press and there would have been at least one member of each family who was an expert olive separator. We did not separate the olives. 3) Crack or break the skin so the oil can come out.

The cracking is done in this machine. It took five people to push it around, and it took probably 15-20 minutes to get the olives cracked enough to move onto step four. It was fun to move the wheel around, and it was really interesting to watch it rotate; it doesn't roll like you would imagine it too, but rather it sort of scoots along in an awkward non-circular shape that is probably not describable. We had someone going around behind with a shovel scraping the olives down into the middle so that they would get crushed, a lot like the idea of scraping the sides of a mixing bowl when you're making a batter of some sort. And, as I'm sure you can see, it was quite messy.

So once the cracking is complete, the next step is 4) Crush the pulp, which has been gathered in baskets. This part was even more messy than the cracking, we picked up all the olive pulp with our hands to put them into the baskets (which were also disgusting because they had been full of olive pulp previously). Unfortunately, the olive juice appears to stain as well, so some people will now have clothing with Jerusalem stories permanently dyed into them. So it goes.

There were two different olive presses that we used once all of the pulp was into the baskets. They do the same thing, put so much pressure onto the olives that they squeeze out the olive oil, they just have different methods to the same end result. As you can see, we put the baskets of pulp underneath the large corkscrew-like log (I'm sure it has a name, I just don't know what that might be) and then we would rotate it so that it becomes compressed and the olives release their oil. While Brother Skinner was telling us about the olive oil process prior to going out and experiencing it ourselves, he told us that on good harvest years the oil will for a few seconds turn red as it is first coming out of the pressed olives. It only happens with the very first olives and only for a small amount of time, and then the oil will turn back to it's golden color, but he said he has seen it. I was not in the first group to crush olives today, so I do not know if this occurred with our olives this year.

Step is to 5) Let the oil settle. There is water in the holes that catch all the oil and they told us that by tomorrow morning the oil and the water will have separated (we all know that oil and water go through this phenomenon I hope) and they will be able to take the oil off the top. Anciently, people used the olive oil for cooking, cleaning, lighting, heating, and healing, as well as many other uses. We too use oil that frequently, but it is no longer limited to olive oil.