An Olive Oil Odyssey with Kleos

This blog post is all about our continuous quest to try and give you the very best from every aspect of your holiday. In addition to your scrummy Suffolk breakfast basket that we provide, we also provide plenty of condiments in your kitchen. This is about a little part of that, but then we found that the little touches are what our guests notice.

Sometime during 2024, my old mate Steve and I started discussing the importance of the quality of olive oil.

Steve spent a career in publishing and many years ago published a book on olive oil by a renowned expert. As far as I’m concerned this made Steve an expert in my mind, too.

Over the last year or so he and I have been discussing various ways of leading healthier lifestyles now that we are gentlemen of a certain age. One area that wrestled for our attention was polyphenols in various foodstuffs. Polyphenols in good quality olive oil are powerful plant compounds that help fight inflammation and protect our cells from damage. They’re great for heart and brain health too. Alongside a daily drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, we can also boost our intake with things like berries, nuts, dark chocolate, herbs, and even coffee, all of which are in my daily diet.

A very long story short, we both independently did our own research online and discovered that most olive oils available in the supermarkets do not have a high polyphenol level which typically means they are under 250 mg/kg. In extra virgin olive oil, anything above 250 mg/kg is considered good. High-polyphenol oils often range from 400 to 800 mg/kg or more.

We tried a couple out with incredibly high polyphenol levels in excess of 800, but they also had incredibly high price tags. Then Steve came across Kleos extra-virgin olive oil, produced in  Peloponnese, Greece.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “This has got nothing to do with Suffolk which we normally spend our time talking about.” I agree. However, whilst we endeavour to promote Suffolk and provide as many local ingredients in our breakfast baskets as we can, Suffolk itself is not really renowned for its olive oil, which I’ll come back to.

While Kleos doesn’t publish an exact polyphenol count, it’s made from Koroneiki olives, which are renowned for their naturally high levels, and produced using cold extraction to help retain them. Oils from Koroneiki olives often fall between 500 and 900 mg/kg, putting Kleos comfortably in the high-polyphenol range, even without an official figure. And it worked out to only around £11 per litre, putting it on a par with supermarket prices here in the UK!

I’ve also been making my own sourdough bread recently, which Steve and I used in our scientific tests carried out under strict conditions in a laboratory (aka Steve’s kitchen). Our research concluded that Kleos was an excellent tasting Olive oil, extremely high in polyphenols, and extremely reasonably priced!

Kleos and Woodfarm

Another long story short I ended up communicating with Thanos, a director of Kleos over in Greece and we developed a little mutual admiration for each other’s brands, so much so that I have decided that whilst Kleos it’s not a Suffolk brand, It is an extremely high-quality product, so until Suffolk starts producing high-quality olive oil (which is likely to be never) I have decided to supply provide their olive oil to our guests. Thanos is delighted about this, of course.

You can buy their olive oil directly from their website. In the future, when you come and stay at Woodfarm, you can even taste it first. I have a tablespoon every day in my smoothie, on every salad I have, and I may occasionally dip my sourdough in it. Okay, more than occasionally.