Authentication and Quality Assessment of Lebanese Extra Virgin Olive Oils from “Baladi” Local Variety
Mireille H. Serhan
University of Balamand, Faculty of Health Sciences, Deir El Balamand, P.O. Box 100, Tripoli, Lebanon.

In order to define the authentication parameters of olive oil in Northern Lebanon, three districts were chosen: Batroun, Koura and Zgharta. From each district, five olive orchards cultivated with the local variety named “Baladi”, and without complementary irrigation were selected according to their altitude. 
Three periods of harvest were done in the fifteen olive orchards, once every two weeks, starting from mid-October 2013. The physico-chemical analysis have been undertaken on the samples of oil extracted in a manual oil press: acidity, peroxide value, refractive index, absorbance at different wave length, fatty acid, biophenols and triglycerides profiles.
The results obtained showed that the oleic acid content increases with altitude. Maturity induces the reduction of the refractive index, the content of palmitic and oleic acids in the samples taken from the three regions, while it increased the acidity, the content of stearic and linoleic acids, of biophenols and these triglycerides: LLP, LLL, LLO, LOO, LnLO, LnOP, PLP, POP+EOO, and OLnO.
The oils of these three regions can be differentiated by the following criteria: oleic acid content was higher in the oil extracted from Batroun region, the biophenols were more abundant in the oil extracted from the region of Koura, while polyunsaturated fatty acids content and the triglycerides listed above were higher in the oil extracted in the region of Zgharta.