Rapeseed or olive oil? Wrong question

September 28 2026
3 min reading time

One of them is refined until it tastes of nothing. The other is fruit juice. That difference decides which one you should reach for, and it has nothing to do with the argument people usually have.

Ask which oil is better, rapeseed or olive, and you will get an argument about price or about nutrition. Both arguments miss what is actually different about the two bottles.

Here is the difference. One of them is refined. The other one is juice.

Rapeseed oil is built to taste of nothing

Standard rapeseed oil goes through a refining line after it is pressed. It is degummed, neutralised, bleached and deodorised. Each of those steps removes something: the gums, the free fatty acids, the colour, the aroma. What comes out the far end is pale, almost odourless, and very stable at high heat.

That is not a criticism. It is the point. A refined oil is supposed to disappear. If you are deep-frying a kilo of potatoes, you do not want the fat contributing an opinion. You want heat transfer and nothing else, and you want it cheaply, by the litre. Rapeseed oil does that job better than we do, and it grows an hour from Helsinki rather than 3,000 kilometres away.

Cold-pressed rapeseed oil is a different thing again, and a good thing. It skips the refining, keeps its colour and tastes distinctly of seed and grass. Worth having. It still tastes of rapeseed, though, which is one flavour from one plant. It does not tell you about a place or a year.

Olive oil is fruit juice that happens to be fat

Olives are fruit. Extra virgin olive oil is the juice pressed out of them, and nothing is done to it afterwards. No refining, no deodorising, no blending to a house standard. Our olives are picked by hand in Ermioni, and the oil is extracted below 27 °C, centrifuged, filtered and sealed in tins within hours.

Because nothing is stripped out, everything the fruit had is still in there, including the parts that taste of something. That is why Koroneiki is peppery and Manaki is soft and buttery, from the same estate in the same season. It is also why olive oil from a hot dry year tastes different from the year before. You are tasting agriculture, not a specification.

What you are actually choosing

Not which oil is better. This: do you want the fat to vanish, or do you want it to be an ingredient?

Both answers are correct several times a week. Frying a schnitzel, greasing a tin, making a cake that should taste of vanilla: vanish. Softening onions for a stew, roasting root vegetables, dressing a tomato, finishing a soup or a piece of fish: ingredient. In the second list the oil is one of the four or five things you will actually taste, and a neutral oil contributes nothing to it.

The price argument, honestly

Per litre, we lose. A litre of supermarket rapeseed oil costs a fraction of a litre of single-estate organic olive oil, and no amount of copywriting changes that.

Per use is a different sum. You pour frying oil by the decilitre. You finish a dish with a tablespoon. A 500 ml tin of Koroneiki at €15.95 is roughly thirty tablespoons, which is thirty dishes that taste of something, at about fifty cents each. Compared with a cheap olive oil that has been sitting in clear glass under a supermarket light for a year, it is not really a close contest.

What you can find out

This is the part that is hard to argue with. About our oil you can learn the estate, the grower, the region, the harvest, the extraction temperature and the certification, in both Finland and Greece. About most olive oil on a Finnish shelf you can learn the bottler's address and the phrase ”blend of oils from more than one country”.

Keep the big bottle of rapeseed oil. Genuinely. Then keep a tin of Koroneiki next to the stove for everything the big bottle cannot do.