Andrew's tour of Yorkshire and the Humber In search of oil

Date Published:

14/08/2008

On the road out of Wetherby after visiting the Market Place Deli, I spied a sign that said: 'Wharfe Valley Farm Rape Seed Oil', and decided to stop and have a nose around

Guiding my prying conk around the farm is Stephen Kilby who, along with his parents Geoff and Sally-Anne, runs Wharfe Valley. The Kilbys have been growing rape - the unmistakable bright yellow flowers you see in the countryside - since the late 1980s alongside other rotation crops. Like many farming families they looked into diversification three years ago, and so instead of selling the seeds to market, they began to look at pressing, producing and bottling their own cold-pressed virgin rape seed oil.

"We've recently launched an oak-smoked oil, cold smoked by a local guy," says Stephen and fetches some bread for me to try it with. Rape seed is a member of the brassica family along with cabbage and mustard, so there are hints of that, alongside the smoke. Again, as I found out when I visited Jessie Patterson’s smokery, smoking is used only as a subtle background flavour to provide a point of reference to the main ingredient, in this case the rape seed oil.

Liquid gold

It's a richer colour and more viscous than olive oil. "It has half the saturated fat of olive oil, 10 times the omega 3, and has a much higher smoking point than olive oil - 230 degrees as apposed to 180," adds Stephen. This taste, flavour and versatility has made it popular with big name chefs, such as Lawrence Keogh at Roast in Borough Market and fellow Yorkshire man, James Martin, makes a mayonnaise with it.

Outside Stephen talks me through the production process. "This is rape seed," he says picking up a handful from the silo, "and one ton of seed gives us 200 litres of oil." It's a small black ball that doesn't smell of much, that is, until it's cracked. The seed goes through a sorter to get out any impurities, and then it's into the crusher. We're then left with the oil and the 'meal' – the compressed outer-casing. "We sell this as animal feed," says Geoff. I scoop up a handful; it's warm, dark green, and reminds me of chunky flakes of nori seaweed. Stephen then goes on to explain that this extraction process leaves all of the nutrients in the oil intact but also plenty still in the meal. By way of an example he's got a bag of heat and chemical extracted meal. It looks and tastes of sand; every drop of oil (and nutrition) has been blasted out of it in the quest for maximum yield.

We move into the production unit. Here the oil goes through various filtering processes culminating in a final press that can filter out anything over five microns. This ensures the product stays clear. It's then bottled in specially designed bottles – square at the bottom, round at the top - that the Kilbys get from Italy.

I think this is a great product; it's interesting, versatile, good for you, and tastes complex and flavourful. In the UK we've been so hooked on olive as the de facto good 'healthy oil that anything else now seems strange. But it's worth remembering that 30 years ago olive oil was only available in chemists for cleaning wax out of your ears.

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