--- airs weeknights on SBS Food at 7.00pm and 10.00pm, or stream it free on . Catch Shane on the 'texture' episode 4 January. ---
"I'm from Mediterranean descent so we bathe in olive oil," says chef and television host , letting out a big laugh. "We love olive oil. Even the village where my dad is from [in Malta] is called Żejtun, which means olive."
Delia nearly always reaches for olive oil when he's cooking food.
"Even when you're supposed to use a neutral flavour oil, I can't help myself and pour olive oil, it's such a beautiful flavour," he says. Delia also uses it as a condiment and to finish dishes.
"Finishing a dish with olive oil is awesome. Cooking with it is great; you get some of the flavour, but the flavour and viscosity change. If you can douse your dish with the fresh stuff at the end, it brings the flavour profile up," Delia says.
Recently, he cooked a big snapper for his family and dressed it with a mix of verjuice and olive oil. When grilling fish like this, he recommends breaking up the fish after it's cooked to expose the flesh then pouring oil inside it.
Olive oil is also his oil of choice to make , a Lebanese garlic sauce, which he uses in everything that needs an extra garlic hit.
But olive oil is not only reserved for savoury dishes. "I love using olive oil in desserts because it's quite fruity and it has big flavours. The fattiness of olive oil is really nice with sweet flavours like sugar, vanilla, cinnamon and sweet spices," he explains.
He remembers summers eating vanilla ice-cream drizzled with honey, fennel and olive oil as a kid, but he really only began incorporating olive oil in sweets during his experiments as a chef.
One of his go-to recipes is a cake that he learned to make in Andalusia, an autonomous region in Spain. It's an easy cake, which gets its richness from, you guessed it, olive oil.
"It's like a peasant cake. Everyone can get it right, you don't need to whip eggs; it just goes into a bowl. You mix it and drench it with syrup so you can manipulate it to be any flavours you want," he says. Bonus point: it's a big hit with his two children.
Delia says, paired with a salted white chocolate ice-cream, his olive oil cake with date syrup has all the flavours of the desert: dates, olive oil, salt and spice. Source: Shane Delia's Moorish Spice Journey
Get the recipe
Date, orange and olive oil cake
Delia likes to keep a few different types of olive oil on hand. He uses a mild one to cook with, and keeps the more special bottles to complete dishes.
Finishing a dish with olive oil is awesome. Cooking with it is great.
He loves Spanish olive oil, and can't go past the Australian stuff. "I'm a big fan of Cobram, it's really tasty," he says.
"It's such an amazing production process, so refined, to have such high quality with the volume of oil they produce. And it's Australian-owned."
He also recently received a parcel of special olive oil that was made by the family of a friend in Lebanon, which is "dark, heavy, unfiltered and really gutsy".
These engineers began picking olives and making oil and never looked back. Source: Supplied
However, Delia thinks no country makes olive oil better than another.
"Just like wine, you can get great oils from a multitude of countries. It comes down to the growers and the technique," he says.
"I always feel that small producers in villages that have been doing it for a long time, know what they're doing.
It comes down to how fresh the olive oil is. "You want to make sure it's well-kept. Then, it's different strokes for different folks."
This month on SBS Food's , you can watch Delia make his date, orange and olive oil cake, as well as riz bi-djaj (Lebanese chicken and rice) and a watermelon salad.
Delia is also gearing to reopen his restaurants and for dine-in, now that Melbourne is no longer in lockdown.
