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**Chapter 16** 

© 2012 Lanza, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2012 Lanza, licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Nutritional and Sensory Quality of Table Olives** 

Table olives are greatly consumed mainly by Mediterranean Sea area populations. The italian cuisine, for example, offers many dishes, aperitifs and appetizer in which olives are an essential ingredient: fish and meat cooked with olives, table olive-based condiments for *pasta* and *pizza*, bread-dough mixed with green/black olives, *bruschetta* with olive paste, and so on. The gastronomic uses of olives are widely and very well-known, but the same cannot be said about its nutritional, nutraceutical and sensory properties. The various Italian olive cultivars with remarkable aptitude for processing as table olives have allowed the development of specific and diversified process technologies. Both chemical and biological treatments perform the dual function of hydrolyzing the compounds responsible for the bitter taste of olive fruit and stabilizing the end product to overcome the constraint of seasonal production. All technological interventions have negative collateral effects that must be minimized or at least kept under control to avoid compromising the quality of the processed product to satisfy the expectation, of the consumer, directed towards natural or minimally processed products, whose nutritional properties and health benefits remain

The most important production zones of table olives are located in the Mediterranean area and their consumption is expanding, due to the increasing popularity of the Mediterranean diet (Table 1). In Italy, during the last three years, the average consumption of table olives was approximately 124.000 tonnes/year with a *pro-capite* assumption of 2.1 kg/year. The Italian production covers only 48.1% of the consumers demand, the remaining part is

The Italian table olive-growing boasts millenary traditions and its history is an integral part of Italian culture, since its first inhabitants, in prehistoric epoch, used the alimentary resources offered by the primitive Mediterranean "Macchia" and began to domesticate the wild olive tree. Among the over 500 varieties of *Olea europaea* on the national territory only a

Barbara Lanza

**1. Introduction** 

unaltered.

imported from Spain and Greece.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/51723

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter


http://www.fda.gov/Food/ScienceResearch/LaboratoryMethods/BacteriologicalAnalytic alManualBAM/default.htm.

