Take 130 trees dropping olives on campus walkways. Add students seeking prankish respite from their studies. Mix in a French-born university president with a taste for Mediterranean cuisine.

That’s the formula for making olive oil at the California Institute of Technology, says the Los Angeles Times.

The school, better known for rocket science, is launching its own brand of the golden kitchen condiment, produced from the trees on its Pasadena campus. A minor flood – upward of 300 gallons – is expected this autumn.

“We are here to educate students, but we are also here to give them an opportunity to experience different things in life,” Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau, an engineer who loves cooking, said in explaining why a school without a botany course is embracing a project that seems more suited to a farm college than a Nobel Prize factory.