Questions about DRZZL

Because no single oil does both jobs well, and half of cooking properly is having the right tool for the job. Kitchen is smooth and versatile: the one you reach for at the hob, every day, without thinking. Table is 100% Coratina from Italy - robust, peppery, made for finishing, where you pour it raw and actually taste it. One does the work, one does the talking. Good oil. Both bottles.

Table is 100% Coratina from Italy - a single variety, which is why it's so peppery and so high in polyphenols (that's the catch you feel at the back of your throat). Kitchen is a blend of Spanish Picual olives and Arbequina olives from Portugal. This blend was chosen for a smooth, even flavour that works with just about everything. Different olives, different personalities, blended on purpose.

Once it's open, the clock starts. Oxygen, light and heat begin to wear the flavour down, and within about six weeks an opened bottle is past its best. The good news is the maths is on your side: use oil at the kind of everyday amount you actually should be, and a 500ml is gone in roughly that time anyway. 45 days on average. The size isn't an accident - enough to cook generously with, not so much it sits around going flat.

Walk into any professional kitchen and you'll find the oil in a squeezy bottle — not a heavy glass one. There's a reason. Chefs want control: a clean, precise line of oil exactly where they want it, not the glug-and-hope of a weighted glass spout. The squeezy top gives you that same control at home. The dark green does the other job — keeping light out, since light is one of the fastest ways to flatten a good oil, and a clear bottle on a sunny shelf is quietly working against you. And because it's PET, it won't smash and it travels well, so it reaches you in the same condition it left us. Restaurant kit, basically — built for the oil, and for the person pouring it.

Extra virgin is the juice of the olive, pressed once, mechanically, with no heat and no chemicals — and it has to pass a taste test for defects to earn the name. Plain "olive oil" (sometimes labelled "pure" or "light") has been refined: heated and stripped until most of the flavour and nearly all the good stuff is gone, then often blended with a splash of virgin to give it back some character. Extra virgin keeps what the others throw away.

They're natural compounds in the olive — antioxidants, basically — and they're what give a good oil its pepper and that little catch in your throat. They're also where most of the health benefits live. The catch: they fade with age, heat and light, and they're highest in fresh, robust oils like Coratina. So the pepper isn't a flaw. It's the point.

Yes. Though not the way milk does. It won't make you ill; it just loses its life. First it goes flat, then stale, then rancid (you'll know rancid, it smells like old crayons). Oxygen, light and heat are what get it there, which is why a dark bottle and a cool cupboard matter and why you shouldn't keep it as a souvenir.

Pretty much, yes. Good oil makes good food taste like more of itself — tomatoes more like tomatoes, bread more like bread, a plain salad suddenly worth eating. It won't perform miracles on a burnt dinner, but give it something fresh to work with and it lifts the whole plate. It's the difference between an ingredient that's alive and one that's been sitting in the cupboard since last winter.

For now, the UK. EU and beyond are coming soon — join our newsletter to be first to know, or just ask us directly at hello@drzzloliveoil.com and we'll tell you when we can reach you.

DRZZL was founded by Nat Rudin — former private chef and author of Cooking Fast and Slow, who got tired of good food being let down by tired oil.

It's a way of caring about your food — where the ingredients come from, how they're made, and how you treat them once they're in your kitchen. It isn't about being fancy or following rules. It's about paying attention, because food tastes better when someone does. Good oil is where a lot of it starts: it's the base of so much of what you cook, so it's worth getting right. Cook properly.