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Pressing Engagements, Martinborough’s boutique olive press finds a clever use for the leftover olive skins and pips that could do wonders for your fire pit this season. By Nicola Belsham. Photo by Sam Cameron.
Originally established with one teeny-tiny press in the early 2000’s, Pressing Engagements was an efficiently run mini-micro-business when Roger Smith took the reins in 2008. A mechanical engineer by trade, Roger found himself most useful as maintenance man. With the purchase of two new presses from Tuscany, Roger ‘tweaked’ the mechanics and now the enterprise presses a slightly upscaled 15 to 50 tonnes, producing some of New Zealand’s most award-winning olive oils.
What we don’t appreciate in the delicious drizzle over our salads, are the tonnes of olive skins, pits and pomace that are left behind. These are ‘gifted’ by the producer/grower to the presser for disposal. Commercially, this might be sent to landfill. According to Wikipedia, olive waste within the European Union, amounts to billions of litres per year.
Smith corrects the term ‘waste’ to ‘bio-mass’. It is after all, 100% lignocellulos or sustainable plant matter. In the past, Roger has taken the bio-mass home as a very effective compost for his vegetable patch. Yet sitting in front of an Olive Press, gives a presser time to think. Looking for alternate ways to deal with the bi-product, upcycle the pressings, and with some online concurring, Smith foraged a way to produce Wairarapa Olive Briquettes.
Pressing Engagements run two-stage presses. They pressextra virgin olive oil, and producing olive sludge and wash water as a bi-product. As such, drying the hand-stamped briquettes is key to production. Smith invested in a de-watering screw press to squeeze wash water from the olive pomace, thus producing a maleable product that is individually hand-compressed into moulds, plunged out, and air-dried over the Wairarapa summer to produce 100%, organic and sustainable, burnable fuel.
These burn to embers that give off sustained heat in an indoor fireplace but are also excellent for firepits or barbecues. They are not firelighters – you need to have a decent blaze to kick-start them into flame. But once they get going they will burn stronger than most firewood.
Roger says it’s not a ‘new’ product. Given their high calorific qualities, olive pressings have been used as industrial fuel for heating, cooking and pottery kilns since antiquity. Pressings have even been imported from Morocco to the United Kingdom for commercial power generation. Pressing Engagement’s Wairarapa Olive Briquettes do however, appear to be the first of their kind in New Zealand. And Roger is eager to learn of others.
Roger is a reticent entrepreneur. Far more comfortable to extol the virtues of his business predecessors, the olive press’s award-winning clients (including a producer in the top 25 of the whole entire world) than to commend himself on his upcycling flair. Likewise, Wairarapa Olive Briquettes have been largely sold via word of mouth, through just one or two local retail outlets. But with orders now streaming in from Wellington and Auckland, this is a product that is sure to set both Wairarapa and New Zealand ablaze.
Wairarapa Olive Briquettes info@pressingenagements.co.nzAlso available from Martinborough Wine Merchants.
Photographs taken with permission of Olivio~nor, Martinborough, boutique accommodation and venue. www.olivionor.co.nz
