Why we still mill on granite stones

When Hassine Sfar founded our mill in 1970, granite stones were simply how oil was made. Half a century later, almost everyone has switched to hammer mills — they are faster, cheaper to run, and easier to clean. We kept the stones. Here is why.

A hammer mill smashes olives at high speed, heating the paste and tearing the fruit's cells violently. A granite wheel crushes them slowly, at low temperature, without metal-on-fruit impact. The paste that leaves our stones has never been shocked, never warmed above the ambient air of the mill hall. Slow crushing preserves the volatile aromas that make an early-harvest Chetoui smell like a field of artichokes — molecules that literally evaporate in aggressive milling.

Then comes the press. We use a cold hydraulic press rather than an industrial centrifuge: pressure, not spinning, separates our oil. No hot water is added at any stage — what Italians call lavorazione a freddo in its oldest form. The yield is lower; a centrifuge would extract several points more oil from every tonne. We accept the loss. What stays behind in the pomace is exactly the fraction we do not want in the bottle.

Is tradition alone the argument? No — the laboratory is. Our stone-milled, cold-pressed lots consistently show low peroxide values and high polyphenol retention, and each lot's numbers are published, per batch, on its public trace page. The old way survives at our farms for one reason: measured honestly, it still wins.

From October to January, if you visit Oued el Kenz, you will hear the stones before you see them — a low, patient rumble that has not changed since 1970. Fifty harvests later, we still think it is the best sound in the world.