Caltech enters olive oil business

Today's Most Viewed Stories

• Medford motorcyclists die in wreck in Utah - 9/8/2010
• Ashland graduate found dead along freeway - 9/8/2010
• It's not an illusion, park toy is in Scotland - 9/8/2010
• $377.5 million in Oregon budget cuts begin - 9/8/2010

Text Size: A | A | A

Print this Article Email this Article

Loading...

California Institute of Technology’s Dvin Adalian, left, and Ricky Jones came up with their own equation: Students plus olive trees equals oil.

PASADENA, Calif. — Take 130 trees dropping olives on campus walkways. Add students seeking prankish respite from their studies. Mix in a French-born university president with a taste for Mediterranean cuisine.

That's the formula for making olive oil at the California Institute of Technology.

The school better known for rocket science is launching its own brand of the golden kitchen condiment, produced from the trees on its Pasadena campus. A minor flood — upward of 300 gallons — is expected this fall.

"We are here to educate students, but we are also there to give them an opportunity to experience different things in life," Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau, an engineer who loves cooking, said in explaining why a school without a botany course is embracing a project that seems more suited to a farm college than a Nobel Prize factory.

The olive trees, which average 80 years of age, provide the science-and-engineering campus a canopy of shade from the San Gabriel Valley heat. But those trees drop so many olives in the autumn, staining walkways black and felling skateboarders, that the school sprayed them to retard fruit growth and even considered replacing them with fruitless varieties.

In October, the ripening crop snagged the attention of students Ricky Jones and Dvin Adalian. They began an exercise that might date to Socrates' overworked pupils in ancient Greece: whacking olive trees with a stick (in this case, a plastic pipe) and collecting what falls.

"I was just trying to relieve the stress from being inside and busy all the time. I wanted to go outside and do something else," recalled Jones, 21, a biology major from Minnesota who wants to be a physician.

"As a physics major, I'm supposed to be working on a chalkboard or something," said Adalian, 20, who is from Virginia. "But it's nice to go out and do something physically and show I can do something useful besides physics work."

The two proposed an experiment: Could Caltech's trees produce olive oil?

"We want to figure out stuff people haven't done at Caltech yet," Jones said. "There is always this feeling at Caltech that you want to find something new to do."

Good timing intervened. Recently arrived from being second in command at Georgia Tech, Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, noticed the pair at work with tarps and buckets on the aptly named Olive Walk. Told of their plans, Chameau issued a challenge: If they actually made oil, he would cook them dinner at the presidential residence.

The students, with help at times from as many as 15 friends, took up the dare, armed with a little Internet research and a lot of winging it.

Their 30 pounds of black and green olives were cleaned, soaked and (somewhat) pitted. Four kitchen blenders in the Ruddock House dorm pulverized the olives into "this slurry, a disgusting mess," Jones recalled. The glop, Adalian said, was stewed in "lots and lots of pots" for two hours in kitchens on three dorm floors.

The odor triggered some complaints. "The smell of stewing olives is wonderful, but it is a little bit powerful," said Jones, the dorm president.

Late one night, the crew delivered a surprise portion to the president's house. "We didn't realize they would actually have the moxie to walk up to our door at 10 o'clock at night and hand us the olive oil," recalled Carmichael, a technology researcher who is now Caltech's senior counselor for external relations.

But, keeping their pledge, she and Chameau invited the group over for a November dinner of rabbit stew, onion tarte and cranberry sorbet.

The students' oil was not used in the meal, but the presidential couple and their six guests taste-tested it along with store-bought samples from around the world.

Carmichael admitted having suspicions. "I have to say at first I was not sure I would eat this without seeing them eat it too," she said. "We were sort of new on campus and heard all the local legends of Caltech pranks. We didn't want to be eating dish soap or something." As it turned out, the oil tasted "wonderful."

The students' success inspired Delmy Emerson, Caltech's buildings and grounds director. Her staff sent a batch of olives to a commercial presser. The resulting 54 small bottles are being given to donors, guests and staff.

In a major expansion, plans are under way to harvest 60 trees as part of a fall festival. Students, faculty and grounds crews will do the work from ladders and cherry pickers.

The Santa Barbara Olive Co. will handle pressing and bottling, although students will design the labels. The anticipated 3,000 12.7-ounce bottles will be sold on campus and could generate at least $30,000 — probably for scholarships or gardeners' bonuses.

Caltech has joined the California Olive Oil Council, a trade group, and expects to submit its wares for lab and taste tests to gain that group's approval for extra virgin oil — indicating low acidity, among other things. It is not the first university to do so.

The University of California, Davis wanted to prevent bicycle and pedestrian spills caused by olives dropping from its 1,500 trees, according to Dan Flynn, manager of the campus' olive oil program. The UC Davis Olive Oil brand offers several varieties, including one named after Gunrock, the school's mascot mustang.

California State University, Fresno is working on a much bigger scale, testing mechanical picking on 12,000 trees planted very densely on 20 acres. That school expects this year to produce about 4,000 bottles of Fresno State Estate Reserve.

Caltech's product will be sold under the name Olive Walk. With such commerce, Caltech students realize their oil's quirky origins might be lost, but that's an acceptable trade-off if the harvest festival, complete with a celebratory dinner, becomes a tradition.

Jones imagines a future when he might attend an olive festival as an old alumnus. "The students," he joked, "will be bathing in oil and they could have oil-chugging contests."

Print this Article Email this Article