anyone for olive oil?

A few blocks from our house is a community park that was once a fig, olive, and citrus orchard. Some of the trees still remain and we have been fortunate to happen upon the fig trees when their fruits were ripe. Now, we check the park every few weeks just to see what is flowering or ripening. In the fall, the olives were green and recently they have been darkening.

We wondered if it was possible to make homemade olive oil. Online, sites said that the olives are harvested by shaking them off the trees - those which fall are ready for the oil-making process.

So we shook some trees:

Collected those that fell:

We were then supposed to crush the olives. But without the proper equipment, we decided to use our foley mill to squish them...


It is here that we should confess: we were losing confidence. . . Although the foley mill is the best device for making apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it did not handle the olives and their pits very well. So, we actually transferred everything to the food processor and used a dull dough blade to crush the olives. This worked quickly and with ease.
Great. Now what?

There was no visible sign of oil - no slicks on the top of the mash. Our research suggested that the next move was to let the solids separate from the liquids. OK. We decided that our mash was too concentrated, so we added a little water, thinking that we would separate out the oils from the aqueous anyway. . . Then we bottled them so that the separation could occur over time without contamination.



This is what they looked like the next morning:

No oil on top, no solid/liquid separation. Without access to a (clean, non-bacteria infested, non-lab) centrifuge, we decided to scrap the whole effort. . .

We hear olive mash makes great composting material....