Build a Better Pantry with Olive Oil

A well-stocked pantry is one of the most useful things you can build in a kitchen. Not a pantry crammed with every ingredient imaginable, but a considered collection of things that are genuinely good ingredients that make everything you cook taste better simply by being there.

Olive oil sits at the centre of that kind of pantry. Not as one ingredient among many, but as the foundation the fat that goes into nearly everything, the finishing touch that lifts a simple dish into something memorable, the ingredient whose quality has the greatest effect on the quality of what you eat every day.

Here's how to think about building a pantry around good olive oil, and what else belongs alongside it.

Start With the Right Olive Oil

The single most impactful upgrade most home cooks can make to their pantry is replacing mediocre olive oil with genuinely good olive oil.

Not just "extra virgin" that label, as we've written elsewhere, tells you about grade at pressing but not about freshness, polyphenol content, or whether the oil still tastes like anything by the time it reaches you.

What you want is fresh harvest extra virgin olive oil pressed within the current season, high in polyphenols, unfiltered if possible, and from a producer who can tell you exactly when and where it was made.

Olio Nuovo is that oil. It's what we'd put at the centre of any serious pantry not as a special-occasion luxury, but as the everyday fat that makes everything better.

Two-Oil Strategy

One approach that works well for serious home cooks is keeping two olive oils on hand:

A fresh, high-quality oil for finishing and tasting. This is your Olio Nuovo the oil you pour over food at the table, drizzle on toast in the morning, use to dress salads, and spoon over eggs. It's the oil that gets tasted, not hidden. Keep it in a cool dark place and use it freely.

A decent, less expensive oil for cooking. When you're sautéing onions, roasting a tray of vegetables at high heat, or frying something where the oil is a medium rather than the point, you don't need to use your best oil. A good quality but less precious extra virgin does the job here.

This approach means your finest oil is always used where it makes the most difference — at the table, at the end of cooking, where its flavour and complexity can actually be appreciated.

What Belongs Alongside Good Olive Oil

A pantry built around great olive oil doesn't need to be complicated. A handful of high-quality staples, used well, will serve you better than a hundred mediocre ingredients used carelessly.

Flaky sea salt. Salt and good olive oil are inseparable partners. A coarse, flaky salt, Maldon is the benchmark, but there are excellent Australian alternatives dissolves slowly on food and gives texture as well as seasoning. Keep it on the table, not just in the kitchen.

Good wine vinegar. Red wine vinegar or white wine vinegar from a decent producer is the foundation of any good vinaigrette and adds brightness to almost anything. With good olive oil, you have the basics of dressing sorted.

Lemons. Fresh lemon juice does what vinegar does but with more complexity and freshness. Olive oil and lemon is one of the great flavour combinations in all of cooking on fish, on vegetables, on salads, on grilled meat.

Canned tomatoes. Good quality canned tomatoes — San Marzano or a decent Australian equivalent combined with good olive oil and nothing else makes a pasta sauce that needs no apology. The quality of both ingredients matters enormously here.

Dried legumes or good quality tinned ones. White beans, chickpeas, lentils, cannellini. These are the backbone of simple, satisfying meals and they're transformed by good olive oil. A bowl of white beans dressed generously with Olio Nuovo, lemon, and salt is a complete and deeply satisfying meal.

Sourdough or good bread. For the simplest and most direct way to taste your olive oil. A well-made loaf, good oil, flaky salt. No recipe required.

Good parmesan or aged pecorino. A block of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated over pasta finished with olive oil, is one of the great simple combinations. Also excellent eaten in chunks alongside a pour of Olio Nuovo and some good bread.

Anchovies. A tin or jar of good quality anchovies packed in olive oil is one of the most useful flavour tools in a pantry. They add depth and umami to sauces, dressings, and roasted vegetables in a way that's hard to replicate. And they love good olive oil.

The Philosophy Behind a Good Pantry

The common thread through everything above is quality over quantity. A pantry with ten genuinely excellent ingredients will serve you better than a pantry with fifty mediocre ones.

This matters particularly for olive oil because it's used in such quantity and in so many applications. If you use a cup of olive oil a week across all your cooking and finishing, the quality of that oil has a larger cumulative effect on what you eat than almost any other ingredient choice you make.

Cheap olive oil used generously is better than good olive oil used sparingly. But genuinely good olive oil used generously poured freely, not rationed is the goal. The Mediterranean diet wasn't built on people measuring out careful teaspoons of their finest oil. It was built on people using good oil abundantly, because good oil was what they had.

Build your pantry the same way. Start with the best olive oil you can find. Use it freely. Everything else follows from there.

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Gold — Royal Tasmanian Fine Food Awards 2025. Gold — Dubai Olive Oil Competition 2025.