10 am to 5 pm
The Paso Robles Olive Festival is under way in the downtown city park! Olive oil producers from all over California will be serving their oils for tasting, a culinary row will serve up samples of food made with or inspired by olive oils (including free olive oil ice cream), beer and wine tasting, and an olive oil cooking contest.
Visit Paso Robles Olive Festival for more information, recipes, and photos.
Even if you can't attend, you can enjoy an olive festival in your kitchen every night just by trying a new olive recipe from the festival's cookbook competition. Start work now on your own entry for next year's cookbook.
Olives remain a small part of San Luis Obispo County’s total agriculture scene, but as backyard hobbyists continue to plant them, the crop keeps attracting attention in local events and at the county level.
"The last five years demonstrated the important, growing olive oil industry in our county as well as the state," said Clotilde Julien, co-owner of Olea Farm along with her husband, Ives.
Now in its sixth year, festival officials say they have 20 percent more sellers participating than in 2008 because the crop is gaining popularity.
The county began paying more attention to olive tree acreage in its crops report during the past few years, county agricultural inspector biologist Tamara Kleemann said, as more growers popped up, likely lured in by the success of wine grapes because they need similar growing conditions. In 2006, county records show about a few hundred acres of olive trees.
But the numbers don’t show a full picture in the early years, Kleemann said, because the county didn’t know about all the local olive growers present in the area. In 2007, when officials asked around and grew their database of growers, the report’s olive acreage showed a much larger jump, at about 1,200 acres. However, after the 2007 freeze, younger trees died, and that number dropped to about 830 acres in 2008. In each of those annual acreages, Kleemann said, not all are of bearing age.
There are very few local commercial olive producers, she added, and most growers are hobbyists who grow for their family or small businesses.
That makes the fruit a small player in county agriculture, Kleemann said, but still one to keep track of. Olives are currently lumped with miscellaneous crops. Larger crops, such as wine grapes, have their own category. Wine grapes are the county’s most dominant crop with 36,845 acres planted by 2008.
Once matured and harvested, olives are picked from the trees and processed into many forms, such as traditionally bottled olive oil. They may also be served whole in dishes, made into spreads or pressed into flavored olive oils, such as lemon oil to be drizzled on cakes or basil-flavored oil for pies.
Source: San Luis Obispo Tribune, Tonya Strickland
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