Duo 250ml: the right way to try olive oil properly

Olivko Duo 250ml is two 250ml bottles — 500ml in total. It is the set for someone who has not used genuinely fresh extra virgin olive oil before, and wants to know whether it suits their cooking before buying more.

Why a small bottle for a first try

Fresh extra virgin olive oil has a strong taste. It catches peppery at the back of the throat and runs slightly bitter at the tip of the tongue. Both of those come from polyphenols, and both are marks of good oil — but they are also nothing like the cooking oil most Malaysian kitchens are used to.

Some people take to it immediately. Some need a few weeks. Buying a litre before you know which you are is an unnecessary bet.

Why two bottles and not one

A single 250ml bottle empties too fast to tell you much. You will use it on a few dishes, and then it is gone before you have tried the oil in more than one way.

With two, you can open one for cooking and keep the second for raw dishes — which is where the oil's flavour shows most clearly. You end up with a far more honest picture of whether it fits your kitchen.

Six ways to try it over two weeks

1. 1.Pour a little on bread and taste the oil on its own, with nothing else
2. 2.Stir it through hot white rice with a pinch of salt
3. 3.Use it instead of butter for slowly cooked scrambled eggs
4. 4.Make a plain salad with just oil, lime and salt
5. 5.Roast potato or sweet potato in it until browned
6. 6.Pour it over hot soup once the heat is off

The first test tells you the most. Good olive oil should taste of something — green, slightly bitter, peppery at the finish. Oil that tastes of nothing at all is not necessarily fake, but it is not fresh.

What you should notice

Fresh extra virgin olive oil should give you three things, in order: a green fruity aroma like cut grass, a light bitterness at the back of the tongue, and a peppery catch at the back of the throat a few seconds after swallowing.

All three are scored as positive attributes in formal assessment, not as faults. If you get none of them — if the oil simply tastes oily and nothing more — that tells you something about the oil, not about your palate.

The oil in both bottles

Organic extra virgin, single-origin Tunisian, cold pressed and bottled at source. Free acidity 0.18% (ONH Tunis, report N° 2025B1064, 17 March 2026) against an international ceiling of 0.8%, and up to 600 mg/kg of total polyphenols. Halal recognised by JAKIM.

After these two bottles

If you find you like it and use it more often than expected, the Duo 500ml gives you a litre across two bottles and lasts considerably longer. If you find you use it only for salads and raw dishes, a single 250ml is the right size to repeat.

This bundle comes with a free jar of Madu Habbatussauda.