Anyway, for me that's incomprehensible. I have stir fried with EVOO all my life and I have never seen it burn. The only exception is when I've accidentally, and stupidly, left the pan with only olive oil in it in full heat and went off to do something else, at which point it starts smoking and smelling bad. I have also never had it turn bitter, no matter what I've done with it. I've burned food cooked in olive oil, and occasionally the food has turned bitter (burned onions and garlic taste bitter for example; eugh) but mostly it just tastes burnt.
I've also used olive oil for deep frying and again it has never burnt on me, although lately I prefer to use cheaper oils, like sunflower oil, also because I find that deep frying with olive oil makes food taste too heavy, as if you cooked it in lard or fat (and that's not what I'm going for when I make chips or falafel, say).
So my conclusion is that people outside the Mediterranean, including in the US, just don't normally cook with good quality EVOO. I can certainly see lower quality olive oils behaving badly at high temperatures.
