🫒 Chemlali

Chemlali (Chemlali Sfax) is Tunisia's main oil olive cultivar, with small fruit, native to the area around Sfax. According to the World Catalogue of Olive Varieties of the International Olive Council (IOC), it accounts for about 56% of the country's olive area and 69% of its trees (2013 data); the 2012 IOC review put its share even higher, at about 85% of the area and over 80% of Tunisian olive oil.

The cultivar grows throughout central and southern Tunisia, where olives cover almost 1.8 million hectares in all. It is well adapted to drought and salty soils and has become the symbol of the Sfax “olive forest”: on rain-fed land the trees are planted very sparsely, 17 per hectare, on a 24 × 24 m grid. As early as 1908 the American botanist Thomas Kearney described these orchards, with trees 80 feet apart.

The tree is vigorous and upright, with a dense crown, and is self-pollinating. It ripens early, in November. The fruit is small but plentiful and very oily: its fat content reaches 29%. Yields are high, but on rain-fed land they alternate strongly from year to year. The cultivar is extremely susceptible to verticillium wilt.

Chemlali oil is low in oleic acid, no more than about 59%, and high in palmitic acid. From an early harvest it is intensely fruity, slightly bitter and pungent; the 2012 review describes it as not bitter, sometimes with a tomato note. To change the oil's fatty acid profile, Tunisia has been breeding new cultivars since the 1990s, and five of them were recently added to the national catalogue.

How it differs from its lookalike. Most Tunisian olive oil comes from Chemlali. Do not mix it up with the Algerian Chemlal: the names are close, but according to the IOC catalogue they are different cultivars with different genetic profiles.