Let’s Talk About…Oil
Besides perhaps salt, oil may be the most important cooking ingredient in your kitchen.
It serves to transfer not only flavor, but heat to your food when cooking on the stovetop or in the oven. And surprise surprise, there’s dozens of oils out there and they are not created equal.
Above: Extra Virgin Olive Oil; Coconut Oil; and Avocado Oil.
I tend to avoid Canola and Palm oils because they are usually refined, bleached and deodorized through chemical and heated treatments, which can cause them to break down and go rancid quickly - sometimes before they’ve hit store shelves. That’s gross. Nobody wants to cook with that.
To avoid this, I cook with minimally processed oils. At the grocery store, I look for key words like “cold pressed,” “raw” or “virgin” on the label. Cold-pressed oils have retained not only their natural color and flavors but their structural integrity, and as an added bonus, are low in trans fats. Depending on what I’m cooking, the smoke point also comes into play and determines what oil I’m going to use.
The smoke point of an oil is the point at which - you guessed it - the oil begins to smoke. Smoking oil can be okay for a short period of time if cooking with a very hot skillet or a wok, but you usually want to avoid it. When oils go past their smoke point, they begin to break down, creating free radicals and imparting an unwanted burnt taste and smell to your food. Additionally, it’s a fire hazard and we don’t want to start a grease or oil fire in the kitchen!
Let me tell you about the oils that have worked best for me:
Olive Oil is golden in color, and has a mild taste. Its smoke point is somewhere between 374 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it ideal for cooking on the stovetop and in the oven. I chiefly use olive oil for cooking up chicken or sausage on the stovetop, and always use it when making salad dressings or pasta salad because of its light flavor.
Avocado Oil is golden-green in color and despite its name doesn’t taste anything like avocados, at least to me. It has a very mild taste; I would go so far as saying it’s tasteless, which, combined with its very high smoke point of 520 degrees Fahrenheit, makes it perfect for cooking almost anything. I use it for stovetop cooking, oiling sheet pans for oven cooking, deep frying, and have even used it in salads when my olive oil has run low. It’s my go-to oil, and the one I use most in the kitchen.
Coconut Oil was my go-to before I began using avocado oil. Unlike many oils used in the kitchen, coconut oil is solid at room temperature because of its saturated fat content. Saturated fat can be good in moderate doses, and a little coconut oil goes a long way. It does have a coconutty flavor and a relatively low smoke point of 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s not ideal for all cooking methods. While I used to cook with it quite a bit, I’ve limited it to use as a spray for coating pans (instead of using something like PAM) and for making the best gosh darn popcorn you ever tasted (but that’s a recipe for another time).
All three of these oils are vegan and gluten-free, and are available in cooking sprays, which can be used to coat baking sheets, foil, casserole dishes, or even your grill!
