Tag: superfood

Bergamot: Our quality brand

7.02.2019

SMAF Associates LTD operates in the Bergamot sector as a national and international “Supplier”. Our activity towards the Bergamot starts from a long experience in the agricultural products market, in the buying, selling, import-export, logistics, sea-to-sea and land transport, insurance and customs issues. We also sell the Calabrian BERGAMOT DERIVATIVES: essence, debris, puree and juice.

Our quality brand protects the ORIGINAL BERGAMOT OF CALABRIA, a citrus fruit whose worldwide cultivation is concentrated mostly in Italy (about 90%), in the province of Reggio Calabria.

The presence of liaison offices in Calabria ensures us a strategic position for the supply and distribution of this good. We are the privileged interlocutor for the World of Commercial Catering and Collective Food, the HORECA sector and all the business forms that need a high level of quality about Bergamot as well as a constant and customized quality standard.

Boxes, ready to be loaded on the pallet

From our photos in this post, you can clearly understand how our quality brand offers the best fruit, coming from the real bergamot cultivation as rooted on the Ionian coast of Reggio Calabria, in the area from Villa San Giovanni to Gioiosa Jonica, on an area of about 1500 hectares, with a cultivation that makes 20,000 tons of fruit with an average of 100,000 kg. of essential oil.

In this place, Bergamot is mainly cultivated in alluvial and clayey limestone fields, where a greater yield of essential oil is obtained. The best fields are those located in hilly areas not subject to frost and exposed to good sun-lighting. In fact, bergamot is very sensitive to thermal swings and can be damaged if the temperature drops below 3 ° C or rises too much; it also needs frequent irrigation.

CULTIVARS GUARANTEED BY OUR BRAND

Of the bergamot are known three cultivars (typologies):

Castagnaro: The fruit is glossy, medium-thick peel. The fruit harvest begins in November. The tree is good height and has large leaves with a lanceolate geometry.

Feminine: The fruit is spherical with a thin skin. The fruit harvest begins at the end of October and the tree grows quickly but with little height. It is a plant little long but premature and has medium growth leaves with a lanceolate geometry.

Fantastic: The fruit is globe shaped, the plant has good height, it is rustic and has larger leaves than other cultivars. Harvesting of fruits takes place in November-December.

TECHNICAL USE

Use in cosmetics: Bergamot has a delicate and persistent aroma, which is an excellent scent even by itself.

Nobody could imagine that our perfumes come from these boxes

Nevertheless, along with other citrus essential oils it contributes to fix the bouquet of perfumes by transmitting to cosmetics an indefinable sweetness and exquisite freshness.

It is well-known that essential bergamot oil, thanks to its freshness, is the basic ingredient not only of classic Cologne water but also of many other delicate perfumery products, compositions such as “Chypres” and “Fougères”, of modern basis of fantasy, cosmetics and soaps, etc.; to scent soaps it must be used with caution given its low stability with alkalis.

Other aromatic uses: Bergamot derived pectins can be used for jams or, conversely, for aromatizing tobacco pipes, candies, tea, etc..

In recent years, essential bergamot oil has been used with great success in suntans, thanks to the presence of photodynamic substances (furocumarine or psoralen) known for their ability to stimulate melanogenesis.

Medicinal or herbal use: Essential oil is a potent antiseptic, but unlike phenol, it is not smelly or caustic.

It is antiseptic to urinary, digestive and respiratory tracts.

The strenght of fruit

On a nutritional level, bergamot (or lemon) juice, with the weak acids contained in it (acetic, malic, citric, tartaric acids…), gives rise to the production of carbonates and carbonate alkaline (potassium and calcium above all), which in addition to promoting intestinal calcium absorption, contribute to maintaining the alkaline reserve.

NUTRACEUTICALS

Vitamines: For the vitamin C, Bl and B2, P and vitamin A and E content in juice and flavedo, bergamot can be considered a fruit with good vitamin content; therefore, it is useful in bone disorders due to altered calcium absorption, teething disorders, collagen pathologies, muscular weakness or even neuromuscular hyper-excitability, cardiac heretism, iron deficiency anaemia, hepatic congestion and various diseases with impaired vessel permeability.

The essential bergamot oil (which today is used at an average dose of 1-2 drops per day, away from meals, diluted in water or in a teaspoon of honey or in pearls) stimulates appetite and liver and pancreatic functions.

It is useful in cholecystitis, in tachycardia and arterial hypertension: it is locally useful in stomatitis, gingivitis and pharyngitis; it is an intestinal, disinfectant and astringent pesticide. It is balsamic in the respiratory tract. It acts in a tonic and antidepressant way on the psyche.

Essential oil can be used in the field of herbal medicine as an aroma therapy support, with neuro-sedative and antidepressant functions and as a adjunct to psoriasis and vitiligo therapies.

How can olive oil be genuine?

16.11.2018

SAFETY OF OLIVE OIL AND TESTS

Nowadays, the Italian newspapers report that there are “perfect” chemical analysis but defective olive oil. How is it possible?

Too often laboratories limit themselves to the basic parameters: acidity, peroxides and spectrophotometry. Instead, very low values ​​of these analytical tests do not guarantee that the oil is extra virgin olive oil. A bit of chemistry and biochemistry can help us to understand what can happen inside the olive and not ruin the work of an entire year.

Acidity, peroxides and spectrophotometry are not reliable indices of anaerobic fermentations of olives from which the oil was obtained, but only of processes of “oxidative degeneration” of fat acids.

What does it mean?

The parameter that is mostly taken into consideration, usually, is acidity. The olive growers were taught, in the 1980s and 1990s, that by picking the olives off the ground or leaving them too much in the boxes (not to mention the sacks) fermentations were triggered, which then caused the acidity to rise.

This is an over-simplification that, resisting over time, it is now creating some misunderstanding.

Fermentations are not directly responsible for the increase in acidity. Fermentations are the result of microbial activity of fungi and bacteria that can break the cells of the olive. With this rupture the enzyme lipase is released and the phenomenon called hydrolytic rancidity is triggered, i.e. the triglycerides (three fatty acids + glycerin) are chemically degraded leading to the release of fatty acids, which will be called free fatty acids.

The peroxides, then, are only a direct index of oxidation. Instead, it can be present a rancidity due to the free radicals of unsaturated acids in contact with oxygen in the air. In this case we speak of the different phenomenon of oxidative rancidity. This factor is an important parameters because they indicate if the olives worked were healthy, that is not attacked by the fly of the olive. In fact, in the event of a strong attack of the fly, the larva damages the cells, freeing up lipase, but also favors the oxidation of the pulp, through the entry and exit hole of the larva.

 

Further, in the overripe olives, the cells naturally tend to degrade, releasing lipase, hence the increase in acidity. Worse for the olives harvested from the ground, where phenomena of cellular degradation and oxidation are triggered, due to the breaking of the olive due to mold and bacteria.

Without getting to such excesses, for which we risk that the parameters of acidity and peroxides no longer meet the requirements of the extra virgin olive category, even in olives at the right degree of ripeness and healthy, phenomena of anaerobic fermentation can happen.

But is there a chemical analysis that “measures” the anaerobic fermentations?

The analysis in question exists and is that of ethyl esters (formerly alkyl esters). In fact, the common characteristic of the anaerobic fermentations borne by the olives is that of producing a certain quantity of ethanol. This ethanol combines with free fatty acids, producing ethyl esters. Therefore, an increase in ethyl esters can only be due to anaerobic fermentation that has compromised the olives since the beginning.

It is therefore possible that an oil with relatively low acidity, even below 0.3, and equally low peroxides, may be defective, such that it can not be allowed to be classified as extra virgin olive oil. The paths that lead to the formation of acidity of the oil and those that lead to the formation of heating and rancid defects, despite having points in common, are absolutely different from the biochemical point of view.

It is no coincidence that low quality oils, which have been involved in judicial investigations over the last few years, have had the basic parameters (acidity, peroxides and spectrophotometry) low and more than responding to the extra virgin category, but higher ethyl ester values (or border line, when not openly beyond threshold) and more or less marked organoleptic defects.

Beyond the legal issues, it is clear that the basic parameters are insufficient to guarantee not only that the oil is of quality but also that it is extra virgin olive oil.

 

OUR ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM

SMAF LTD is an intermediary of Calabrian olive oil corresponding to the trade names provided for in Directive 136/6623 / EEC, Reg. EC 2568/91 and Reg. EC 1989/03.

The types we guarantee are:

  • Extra virgin olive oil with an acidity of less than 0.8%
  • Virgin olive oil with an acidity up to 2%
  • Olive oil composed of fine oils and oils of virgin olives with an acidity not exceeding 1%.

In all cases, the anaerobic fermentation of these genuine is prevented by the cold press squeeze of Calabria olives, and by the care of our producers in collection of olives.