La Espanola Extra Virgin and Pure Olive Oil in Bangladesh

One word on these labels decides almost everything about what is inside: extra virgin or pure. They are two different grades of olive oil, pressed and treated differently, and they behave differently in a pan. Most of the questions people arrive with about this brand are really that one question.

Both grades are listed here, each in several bottle sizes, so the second decision is how much oil a kitchen will actually get through before it goes stale. Everything sits on Arogga’s Cooking & Baking shelf alongside the other cooking oils and ghee.

Extra Virgin or Pure: What the Words Mean

Extra virgin is juice. The olives are crushed and the oil is separated mechanically, without heat or solvents, and nothing is done to it afterwards. It keeps the taste and the colour of the fruit it came from, which is why one bottle can be grassy and peppery and another mild.

Pure olive oil — sometimes printed as classic or simply as olive oil — is a blend. Refined olive oil makes up most of it, with some virgin oil added back for flavour. Refining strips out the strong tastes and the bits that burn, leaving a lighter, more neutral oil that takes heat better.

Neither grade is a substitute for the other in the kitchen, and the price gap between them follows the processing rather than the quality of the olives.

The Extra Virgin Bottles

These carry the accented form of the name, La Española, and all of them state Spain on the label. The range runs from a half-litre bottle up to a five-litre container:

• La Española Extra Virgin Olive Oil From Spain - 500ml — the bottle most households buy first
• La Española Extra Virgin Olive Oil 1 Litre from Spain — the regular-use size
• La Española Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Spain - 2Liter — for a kitchen that finishes a litre inside a month
• La Española Extra Virgin Olive Oil 5000ml — the five-litre container, and the one to decant from

The Pure Olive Oil Bottles

The pure grade is listed under the plain spelling, La Espanola, in three smaller bottles. This is the everyday cooking oil of the two:

• La Espanola Olive Oil Pure 250ml — the quarter-litre, with the two words of its title the other way round
• La Espanola Pure Olive Oil 500ml
• La Espanola Pure Olive Oil 1000ml — a litre, written in millilitres

A sunflower oil is listed on this brand as well. It is pressed from sunflower seed rather than from olives, so it belongs to a different part of the oil shelf despite sharing the label.

Bottle Sizes, Written Two Ways

Comparing sizes on this brand takes a moment of arithmetic, because the two grades count their volume in different units.

Millilitres against litres

The extra virgin bottles say 1 Litre, 2Liter and 5000ml. The pure bottles say 250ml, 500ml and 1000ml. So a litre of extra virgin and a litre of pure appear under two different notations, and a shopper filtering or searching on one unit will see only half the shelf.

Which size suits which kitchen

Buy a size the household will finish within a few months of opening, because air is what turns olive oil. Rough guide:

• A quarter-litre, for a kitchen that reaches for olive oil now and again.
• A half-litre or a litre, where it goes into cooking most weeks.
• Two litres or five, only where the oil is decanted into a small bottle and the container stays shut.

Which Grade for Which Job

The split here is about heat and about flavour, and the two pull in opposite directions.

Over heat

Pure olive oil holds up better in a hot pan. Refining removes the free fatty acids and the fragments of fruit that start smoking first, so it tolerates the temperatures bhuna and deep frying reach. Extra virgin can be cooked with, and it is wasted on anything that gets hot enough to smoke it.

Raw, or added at the end

Extra virgin is where the flavour lives, so it earns its keep uncooked — over a salad, stirred through a dip, poured over bread or spooned onto a dish once it has left the stove. Taste a spoonful on its own once; the pepper at the back of the throat is the mark of a fresh pressing.

La Espanola and La Española

The printed name carries a tilde over the n, and the catalogue is split on whether to reproduce it: the extra virgin titles keep it, the pure ones do not. Both are the same brand from the same bottler.

Typing the tilde is not practical on most keyboards here, and it is not necessary — la espanola and la espanola olive oil both find the range. People also arrive having written la spagnola, which is the Italian form of the same word, and that is the same brand too. Searching on olive oil plus the size you want is the simplest route of all.

What Is in the Bottle

Olive oil of either grade is a single-ingredient product: olives, and nothing else. There is no added flavouring, no emulsifier and no preservative in a plain olive oil, which is why the label is short.

Reading the label before you buy

Check the grade word and the harvest or expiry date, which are the two things that actually differ between bottles of the same size. Each listing above reproduces the pack details, and that is where to settle any question about origin or allergens before ordering.

Storing an Opened Bottle

Light, heat and air are what age olive oil, in that order. A bottle left on the counter beside the stove will fade faster than the same bottle in a cupboard, and a container that is half air ages faster than a full one.

Why a bottle can turn cloudy

In cold weather olive oil goes hazy and can set into soft white flecks. That is the natural waxes crystallising, it happens to good oil as readily as to ordinary oil, and it reverses completely once the bottle comes back to room temperature. Nothing is wrong with the oil and it does not need throwing out.

What Changes the Price

Grade comes first. An extra virgin oil is the first mechanical pressing of fruit picked at the right moment, and far less of it comes out of a given weight of olives than a refined blend yields.

Then the harvest. Olive oil is an agricultural commodity with one crop a year, and a dry season in Andalusia shows up on shelves in Dhaka several months later. Add shipping for a heavy liquid, import duty and the exchange rate on the day, and the figure moves more often than a pantry item has any right to.

Printing any of those numbers here would be out of date before the next harvest is in. The live figure sits on each listing above, next to the bottle size, where the two can be read together.

About La Espanola

La Española is a Spanish olive oil brand from Andalusia, the region in the south of Spain where most of the country’s olive groves lie. The name is simply the Spanish feminine adjective meaning the Spanish one, written with a tilde over the n.

The brand bottles extra virgin olive oil and refined-and-blended olive oil under the classic and pure descriptions, alongside seed oils including sunflower, and a range of table olives. Its oils are drawn from Spanish olive varieties and bottled in Spain for export.

Spain produces more olive oil than any other country, and Spanish brands dominate the imported-oil shelf in most markets that do not grow their own. La Española is sold across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and reaches Bangladesh through importers supplying supermarkets, speciality grocers and online retail.

Where the Range Sits on Arogga

Every bottle on this brand is filed in one place: Ghee & Oil, where the olive oils sit beside mustard oil, soybean oil, rice bran oil and ghee. That shelf is the quickest way to compare this brand against the other imported oils Arogga carries.

Confirm the grade word and the volume in the listing title before you order. Two bottles on this brand hold the same litre and say so in different units, and the grade word sits in a different position on one of the pure listings.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the difference between extra virgin and pure olive oil?

Processing. Extra virgin is pressed mechanically from olives and left alone, so it keeps the fruit’s taste and colour. Pure is mostly refined olive oil with some virgin blended back in, which makes it lighter in flavour and steadier over heat.

2. Which one should go in the frying pan?

The pure grade. It has a higher smoke point because refining takes out the parts that burn first. Keep the extra virgin for salads, dips and finishing, where its flavour is the point and the heat never reaches it.

3. Why is one bottle marked 1 Litre and another 1000ml?

They are the same volume written two ways. The extra virgin titles use litres and the pure titles use millilitres, which is a registration habit rather than any difference in the bottle. Convert before comparing.

4. Does an opened bottle need refrigerating?

No. A cool dark cupboard away from the stove is what it wants. The fridge makes olive oil cloudy and thick without extending its life in any useful way, and you then have to wait for it to warm up before pouring.

5. My bottle has gone cloudy. Has it spoiled?

Almost certainly not. Cold makes the natural waxes in olive oil crystallise, and the haze clears on its own at room temperature. Judge oil by its smell instead — oil past its time smells flat or like old crayons.

6. অলিভ অয়েলকে বাংলায় কী বলে?

জলপাই তেল। জলপাই ফল থেকে চাপ দিয়ে বের করা তেল, তাই নামটা সোজাসুজি। বাজারে প্রায় সবাই ইংরেজি নামেই খোঁজেন, আর extra virgin বা pure — লেবেলের এই শব্দটাই আসল পার্থক্য বোঝায়।

7. বোতল খোলার পর অলিভ অয়েল কতদিন ভালো থাকে?

মাসকয়েক, তবে নির্ভর করে কোথায় রাখছেন তার উপর। চুলার পাশে বা আলোতে রাখলে তাড়াতাড়ি স্বাদ নষ্ট হয়ে যায়। ঠান্ডা অন্ধকার জায়গায় ঢাকনা শক্ত করে রাখুন, আর বড় bottle কিনলে অল্প করে ছোট বোতলে ঢেলে ব্যবহার করুন।