Lindsay Marie Morris

Sicilian olives, particularly those grown in the Mount Etna region, benefit from long, hot summers and mild winters—something the western Sacramento Valley's semi-arid climate delivers.

That's where Bondolio olive oil producers Karen and Malcolm Bond grow their Sicilian olives. The couple first purchased their farm in 1986. Back then, it was an almond farm. However, the trees were never big producers, so they pulled them out in 1999 with an interest in starting anew.

A chance encounter with a particularly good fresh olive oil inspired them to set their sights on olive growing. 

Getting started was far from easy, but through persistence and self-taught craftsmanship, the couple is not just growing certified organic Sicilian olives but producing award-winning olive oil. 

I spoke with Karen to learn more about Bondolio's start, why she chose Sicilian olives, and her favorite ways to use her olive oils. 

 

Tell us how you decided to grow olives.

We were in Naples for Christmas between 1999 and 2000. We stayed in a villa east of Naples. Just as we were leaving, the owner said, "We just made our fresh olive oil last night. Would you like to taste it?" And I said, "I've always cooked with olive oil, but I've never tasted fresh olive oil." 

Being a nice Italian girl from South Jersey, I was very anxious to taste it. She took us to their farm, where all the trees were over a thousand years old and had huge gnarly trunks. She took us to a little stone building with a wood-burning stove. She toasted some bread and poured this wonderful liquid on top with a little bit of sea salt, and I fell in love. I said, "This is what we're doing on our farm."

 

Why did you choose Sicilian olive cultivars?

After deciding to do olives, we went on a two-year mission to find the right olive oil that met my needs. I always bought Italian olive oils because they tend to be fruity—especially southern Italian oils. And so we went all over Italy tasting oils at farms. If we saw a sign for olive oil, we would stop and buy some. We would go to grocery stores and farmers markets all over Italy to taste the oil. My husband would put olives in brown paper bags for me to taste, and I always picked the same three olives: Nocellara, Biancolilla, and Cerasuola. It's your typical Sicilian blend that most families have. 

We asked nurseries in California if they had these trees, and they said no. It would take two to three years before they could sell any to us; they would have to import them. So we got our own import license and imported the trees. 

 

Karen Bond holds her prized olives.

 

Tell us about that process.

We found a grower who said they had imported trees to the U.S. When the trees arrived, the FDA called us and said, "We have a problem; come down to the San Francisco airport."

So we had to go to the Department of Agriculture at the airport, and they took Malcolm through a series of clean rooms, opened the box, and showed that the little baby trees had soil on the roots. They then opened an incinerator and threw our trees away. So that was heartbreaking. 

We had to find a grower who could prove they had imported to the U.S. We finally found someone. In the meantime, the University of Florence helped us design our orchard, and they recommended that we bring in a fourth tree type, a Pendolino. Even though olives are self-pollinating, the Pendolino is a pollinating tree, and we'd have a higher production.

Our little baby trees arrived on Christmas Eve, 2006, six years into the process. I always tell people we were born during a time when delayed gratification was a good thing.

We took the baby trees home on Christmas Eve. They arrived on a Lufthansa flight at around one o'clock. We were just praying they would get through customs and then the Department of Agriculture because they were only packed in vermiculite. It was a three-day holiday, so everything would be closed, and we wouldn't be able to pick them up. They arrived at the Department of Agriculture at ten minutes to five o'clock, and they got cleared. So we were able to bring them home.

The next day, I cooked dinner, family and friends came over, and we planted 1,250 trees in two-inch pots. The problem was that they had to be quarantined, so we had to put them in a greenhouse.

 

The state and the feds would come and pull a tree out with its roots and take it with them to test for pests and diseases. 

Because the trees were growing, we had to transplant them to five-gallon pots. And finally, after two and a half years, they said we could plant them. 

So that's 2008. I think they went into the ground in the spring of 2009 because they were cleared in late summer, and you just can't plant at that time. It's too hot. 

In the first year, 2010, we actually had little olives on all the trees, so we picked them all. We only got about 300 pounds.

Malcolm made his own homemade mill, and we milled them, and it tasted good. So we said,
"Okay, let's move forward." 

The very next year, we got around 3,000 pounds. There was a mobile mill then, and the oil tasted great, so I said, "Let's enter the Yolo County Fair." Malcolm said, "No, we're going to New York and L.A." They're the two big international competitions where everyone from around the world enters their olive oil. We won gold in New York, gold in L.A., Best in Show in Yolo County, and Best in Show in Napa County in our very first year.

Our phone started ringing off the wall, and people wanted to buy our oil. The same thing has happened just about every year.

Malcolm and Karen Bond

 

What sets Bondolio apart from other California olive oils?

California olive oils are Spanish, French, northern Italian, or Greek, which have different flavor profiles. Arbequina tends to be a very mild oil, and so many people grow Arbequina. I wanted ours to be different from everyone else's.

Some people have brought in Biancolilla, and some people have brought in Nocellara, but no one has brought in Cerasuola. It's very difficult to propagate. They told us we would lose 80%, and we did not. We probably lost only 10%. Because we have such rich soil here, they were happy growing here. But I think that's what sets us aside. It's a totally different blend from everyone else in California. 

 

Karen Bond sips her liquid gold.

How do you use your olive oils?

I use olive oil every single day. For example, we normally have poached eggs and roasted potatoes for breakfast, so we roast the potatoes in olive oil and pour olive oil on the eggs. I use olive oil in just about everything I cook, including pasta, risotto, and fish.

 

We make mandarin oil with our Pendolino. We pick it on the very last day of milling and throw fresh whole mandarins in as we're milling. So it's a great orange oil. I put that over halibut and bake with it. Then, when it comes out of the oven, I pour a little bit of oil over it. 

When Nathan Norris was the head chef of Zuni Cafe, he told us that we had the most versatile olive oil. They always have an olio nuovo dinner in December; he did a whole dinner with our oil. He started with a persimmon salad with goat cheese and pomegranate seeds on the top and poured our oil with a little bit of salt on it. He then made a salad, then he made fish, and then he made a dark chocolate sorbet with our oil on top. And it was to die for. Our olive oils don't have a bitter flavor, so they can go with a lot of different foods.  

 

Bondolio olive oil served with crostini.

 

You give tours by appointment. Tell us about those.

On our tour, we serve food. If there are 10 or more people and they request it, we'll do pizza on the patio for them. Our biggest tours right now are from retirement communities. They'll come up with 40 people on a bus, and we'll do a tour, and then we'll do pizza for them.

They'll get to taste our oils and vinegar, but sometimes, I serve it with hummus. In the summer, when there are cherry tomatoes because we have a big garden, I will do what I call caprese shooters with our olive oil. I sometimes do crostini, where I'll take fresh tomatoes with garlic and basil with our olive oil and put that over toasted bread. I try to give people ideas on how to use the oil. 

 

We are open to the public one day a year, the second Sunday of December, when we introduce our new oil and have other vendors there. We have pizza, beer, wine, and sodas on the patio, rain or shine. 


Bondolio olive groves

What do you hope people take away from your olive oil?

How to use our oil and to use it quickly: Many people have the misconception that olive oil is like wine in that it ages well. It does not. The longer you keep it, the flavor profile goes down. Ours usually last two years, but it doesn't have the oomph it initially has.

 

I also try to make people understand how healthy olive oil is for them. There's so much evidence coming out now about how olive oil reduces breast cancer, reduces cholesterol, and helps prevent Alzheimer's disease. Both my husband and I are in our seventies. Neither one of us takes any medications. We're extremely healthy. We exercise every day, and we ride our bikes every day. We do Pilates and things, and we go to the doctor, and they say, "We can't believe that you don't take any medications." But I think it's partly because of the olive oil.

 

 

 

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Search for the phrase "Sicilian sea salt" online, and you'll stumble on Sicilian Sea Salt. When you learn that the company's co-owner, Joe Styler, works in tech, it's no wonder the brand has optimal search engine results.

The senior marketing manager of GoDaddy's Domain Academy runs Sicilian Sea Salt with his wife, Leslie Styler, in Phoenix, only fitting for a product once harvested by the Phoenicians. 

Joe's grandmother was from Western Sicily, where he first encountered Sicilian sea salt production. After one taste of the product, he was hooked. As a trained chef, he's fully incorporated it into his food preparation. He's confident other people will have the same experience. 

Joe and I recently chatted about the Sicilian Sea Salt Company and sea salt from Sicily. He shared what sparked the development of the business and what sets his salt apart from that of other salt producers and purveyors. 

 

 

What inspired Sicilian Sea Salt's start?

It was kind of an accident. My son really liked science, and he loves geology. We were in Sicily with my parents and brought my mother-in-law. My dad wanted to take my son out to do what he wanted. He wanted to see rocks. Where are you going to see rocks? They went to the salt museum. They came back with salt, and it was unbelievable how good the salt was.

I've cooked my entire life, worked in many restaurants, and tried different salts. I know salt's importance in different seasonings, but this salt was just different. 

We got some from the museum, and when we went back home, I needed to figure out how to get more of this salt. We couldn't get it here. So, I started reaching out to people in Sicily, and I found a way to get the salt. Then, I started giving it out to people as gifts, and I'd have to get more and more and more salt because everyone wanted it. So, we started getting it in bulk and just giving it away. 

I was talking to one of my friends to whom I gave salt, and they said, "You should sell this because everybody who has it likes it, and there's not enough for you to give out. You should just try and figure out a way to sell it."
 

What makes Sicilian sea salt unique compared to other salts on the market?

There are a couple of things that are really cool about the salt. First, really, there's something that I think is indescribable about it. We call it "magic salt" because everything you put it on tastes better than it would with a different salt. 

What makes it special is that it's harvested in a protected space, a marine reserve in Sicily. So the water where they get the salt from is really pure, and they've been doing it there for thousands of years. We live in Phoenix now, and it's funny because the Phoenicians started it there. For thousands of years, Sicily was conquered by different people, and everybody used the salt. That was one of the main things of importance that they would take from there.

 

When you drive on the coast from Trapani to Marsala, you just see miles and miles of salt pans, and they've been there for thousands of years and have windmills. Those are not really in use; they're decorations now, but they had those windmills to pump the seawater in these flats. 

Sea salt is made from evaporated ocean water, which is solar evaporation. They put it out into big flat spaces called pans, and then the sun and the breeze from the ocean evaporate the water. Then, what's left is the salt. So it's really pure; there's nothing added to it.

It would be organic. The FDA regulates salt, but the USDA does not because it considers it a rock—and this was another challenge when we started to figure out the regulatory issues of running a food business. The FDA regulates anything you put in your mouth. The USDA designates things as organic, and since they don't recognize salt as something that comes under their purview, you can't get an organic designation. But it is really very pure the salt that we get. 

I think that that's different than what most people get. The stuff that you get off the shelf is made by giant chemical companies, and it's really processed to be the same no matter what. They need to do chemical processes to make it like that. Then, they add different chemicals for anti-caking and make sure that it can pour out if it's humid. They also make sure that it's white. They do a lot of processing to it, which makes the bland, almost metallic flavor of normal salt compared to a salt like ours, which is special.  

 
Even the kosher salt is processed in most cases. It has a more bland taste to it. They also strip out a lot of natural minerals, which are trace elements. 

Since each batch that you pull comes from the ocean, it will vary. But there are different amounts of trace elements in there. Some people say it's beneficial for your diet, and there are studies on that, but I think that it just gives a different flavor profile.

What makes Sicilian salt special is its long history. The ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Romans all used salt pans and the grain they grew there as key ingredients in their empires. It's just been a natural way of life for thousands of years. 

It's also environmentally friendly to use salt from the ocean. It has been there for thousands of years and doesn't hurt the land. There's no erosion. 

If you buy Himalayan salt, it's fine; the pink salt is good and helps people, typically in poorer communities, make money. But they do a lot of deep mining and destroy much of the earth. 

Ours is sustainable, which is another thing we like about it.  

 

How have you incorporated sustainability into your packaging?

We try to use paper as much as possible instead of bubble wrap or other things like that so it can be recycled. Then we have these jars that we bought, which can be reused. We just did some packaging with paper envelopes so that you can refill those jars and reuse the jars over and over. We actually recently upgraded to a different jar from France, and it's a little sturdier. You can use our jars for canning or holding other spices, and there's really not much waste.  

 

You source your salt from Trapani. Tell us about its production.

We have a supplier there whose family has been harvesting salt for 50 or 60 years. They do everything by hand. You see them out there with rakes. 

 

There are different types of salt: fleur de sel, which is the French word, and fiore del sale, which is Italian.

 

It forms when the water's still there, and the salt separates and floats up to the top. That has to be really carefully skimmed because if you bump it, it will sink. And that is really crunchy, almost like Maldon, but Maldon's different. It's thin; it's very expensive and labor-intensive to pull it out, but that's all done by hand. I don't know if there's any machine that can do that. So, across the world, that part is done by hand, but as it evaporates, it just gets into these big clumps that have to be broken up.

 

Your core salt comes from what's broken up, and then you have to grind it down further. So all that stuff is done by hand in the same way it's been done for thousands of years with the company we work with. So they're out there with rakes, raking or shoveling the salt into wheelbarrows, and they make it the same way that it's been made for thousands of years. 

For us, that's important too because you can get a lot of salt from Sicily. Many different types are for sale. There are many bigger conglomerates, and they make it in a large-scale manufacturing process. They're not doing it the same way that it's been done. It's not artisanal, and you can taste the difference. You can actually see the difference. The salt's good, but it's not great. It's not that next level. You can look at the two salts by side and just know, just by seeing them, that they're different. When you try them, you can taste the different flavor profiles that they provide. So, it's important for us to have something that's really at the highest level.  

 

How do you enjoy your salt?

I like it in a lot of different ways. I use coarse salt as a finishing salt. We made roast vegetables yesterday, and we used it on top.

We have the coarse salt that we use for a margarita; we put it on the rim. Then, we use the fine salt if we're going to do something like a sauce or if we're baking.

 

I also use it if I'm going to make rubs for barbecue, age steaks, or try to tenderize things like lamb. I use the coarse salt, put it over that, and let it sit.

 

It really makes a difference in almost anything you eat. In fact, my mother has this little salt shaker in which she grinds her own salt, which she brings around now. After trying it from Sicily, she won't use any other salt.
 

What experience do you hope customers will take away?

I hope they have some connection to the Sicilian people, even if they're not Sicilian.

 

One important thing is that there's still high unemployment in Sicily. So, I think it would be good if people were more aware of Sicily as a part of Italy that they could visit. It definitely doesn't get the same amount of attention. It gets quite a bit of Italian tourists, but outside Italy, not many tourists come. I think the more recognition it can get, the more it can help their economy.

If we can make the connection to Sicily and the unique food culture there, I think that's important. Sicily has a really different food culture from the rest of Italy. The one thing I like about Italians is that they're really strict about what qualifies if you make something. If you don't make the exact right ratio of ingredients, then it isn't right. You made it wrong. They have protections over their food. Those things are good because they keep traditions alive. As a chef, I like experimenting with things and changing things up. So, for example, I make pizzas. If I'm not using the right flour, the right tomatoes, and the right cheese, then it doesn't count as a true Neapolitan pizza. 

 

Because so many cultures have ruled over Sicily, there's a lot more flexibility in the type of food that's there, and it's a much more diverse food culture. I like that about Sicily, too. And I think that that's something that people don't really realize. They think of Italian food as spaghetti, meatballs, pizza, or things like that. And there's such a wide variety in Sicily. If you look around at different restaurants or marketplaces, they'll say, "This is Sicilian style," or "These came from Sicily." Italians hold Sicily, in some ways, in high respect as far as their food goes.

I think we can bring more awareness to Sicily as a whole and have more investment there by having people say that they want to go. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was in Partanna, Sicily, and he started olive oil and coffee. That didn't go well, but it was good because he said, "This is what I discovered when I was in Sicily," and it brought more attention to the island. 

I think it's really important for people to do more to help the economy overall and continue the culture. So that's the one thing I hope people take away when they try our salt. I also hope that they start to think more widely about their ingredient choices, how that impacts their health, and how it impacts the flavor of their food. 

 

 

 

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