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Which oils are best to cook with?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#71

Post by Avshalom »

radoslawc wrote: post #38
jwr wrote: post #22

Over the years I've learned to take advice like this with a large grain of salt. Every couple of years this sort of advice seems to get reversed. I still remember reading about olive oil being bad for frying because it was supposedly less resistant to high temperatures and decomposed into something not too healthy. It's been the same with eggs, coffee, and many other things.

Depends who's lobbying I guess, butter vs margarine, coffee vs tea, lard vs sunflower oil. Joking aside traditional western Europe cuisine was based on lard frying (people also ate large amount of eggs which is also supposed to be bad for you) and many of them reached 100 years and more. Of course env pollution was not that big, but limited calories intake plus animal fats and physical activity contributed to their l…

Untreated lard and hydrogenated lard are basically two different fats (I mean technically the difference is fairly small but it's as different as any two vegetable oils)

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#72

Post by Oletros »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #54
Oletros wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yap, usually sunflower oil here in Spain

Never rapeseed though. Wasn't there a huge scandal (with lots of deaths) in the eighties about rapeseed oil, that turned out to be something else?

Yes, in 1981. 1100 deaths because of ingestion of rapeseed oil not suitable for human consumption.

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#73

Post by ericson578 »

When I switched to a keto diet I researched what kinds of oil to cook with and came to similar conclusions. I ditched all of the veggy oils in my pantry except olive oil. I buy a small tub of grass fed beef tallow that lasts about 3 months. A teaspoon for sautéing goes a long way.

Typically I combine an animal fat like the tallow, or butter with some olive oil when cooking. Occasionally I'll get fancy and buy goose or duck fat. Sometimes it's a pat of butter, or a scoop of coconut oil.

The food tastes better, and I feel better. It was hard to unlearn all of the bad science that came out of the last few decades about saturated fats, but hopefully I'll end up being better off for it.

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

eitally wrote: post #12

This article is very hard to draw conclusions from. For one, when they talk about frying, are they literally meaning deep frying / pan frying, or also including sauteeing and similar? Secondly, for Americans at least, they don't mention canola/rapeseed oil at all, and that's by far the most commonly used here. Thirdly, most people have absolutely no clue how hot their pans get when they cook, but I suspect the majori…

I'm pretty sure canola is not the most common used in America, soy (sold as "vegetable oil") is; and, as others have noted, they do address canola by its other name, rapeseed.

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#76

Post by scurvy »

To me, the largest problem I have with olive oil is the counterfeiting and adulterous nature of the industry and its infiltration by organized crime. I stick with ones made in California, but wasn't Costco busted for selling fake olive oil? I realize it's possible to get good stuff and probably avoid the bad, but I'd rather steer clear of the entire mess and use a better alternative.

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#77

Post by hessenwolf »

3minus1 wrote: post #60
kom107 wrote: post #49

Many years ago, worked as a line cook in a high-end restaurant. TL;DR version of what I learned there (and still my rules of thumb): -EVOO is best for salad dressings, oily dipping sauces. -Olive oil is best for raw emulsions (aioli, etc) -Canola for high heat stovetop -Vegetable for baking and deep frying -Sesame for Asian -Don't worry about flavored oils until a recipe calls for them or you're comfortable experimen…

just be careful not to overdo it with sesame oil, because it can overwhelm a dish.

Are you telling us or the line cook? :)

Re: Which oils are best to cook with?

#80

Post by baldfat »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #79

I'm disappointed that this article did not evaluate avocado oil or peanut oil. The latter is increasingly used in frying in the US due to its very high smoke point, and I've been personally using the former for that purpose.

Peanut Oil is used by many burger joints for everything. It is also almost exclusively used in Chinese Restaurants for cooking.

Personally I don't like Peanut Oil because I can't get my pan hot enough efficiently to make use of it i.e. the huge propane touches you see under woks.

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