Is olive oil good or bad for frying?

Apart from expressing doubt about coconut oil as a healthy choice for anyone, especially diabetics, I don’t want to comment directly on the health issues which I’m sure are too complicated to make easy choices just on one or two points like smoke.

However, it may be too easy to confuse high temperature and high flame.

I think I used to steer clear of olive oil for cooking, but I now use it quite a bit and I think a major influence may have been a recipe from Jamie Oliver for mushroom omelette, and I’ll use that for an example: frying mushrooms.

I think Jamie’s words were something like “a splash of olive oil and a knob of butter” (butter’s another I avoid for high temperature). With the shrooms, I use a high flame, spread the oil and melt the butter then throw in the mushrooms. The heat blows excess water out of the mushrooms, so as long as there’s water in the pan, the oil temperature can’t be much over 100C. Once the water’s blasted away I turn the heat right down.

I think this applies to stir frying as well.

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I always use refined Avocado Oil for everything. My bottle of Chosen Foods Avocado oil (source Mexico) lists the following -
Temperature oils can be safely heated to -
Refined Avocado OIl 500F
Canola 435F
Virgin avocado oil 400F
Extra virgin olive oil 375F
Virgin coconut oil 375F (refined or virgin not mentioned)

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Not by the dip your finger in the oil method, ouch!

Occasionally the pro cooks on TV use simple tricks like dropping a few crumbs or some batter or a small tester into the oil and observing the response. Not yet up to temperature? Perhaps they also get a feel for temperature from the heat radiating off a flat plate or pan.

Somewhere in a library in England or the US will be a wealth of old cooking knowledge that holds some more interesting suggestions.

And they probably adjusted their everyday methods to suit the fats and lards to hand. No added oil, cooked with only the inherent fats or rendered lard of the day! Yum, not?

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Actually this is misleading. Extra virgin olive oil has a lower flash point, but you wouldn’t normally use it for frying. Frying should be done using extra light olive oil, not extra virgin. And not does extra light olive oil have a higher flash point than the over-promoted canola oil, but it doesn’t decompose into toxic chemicals like canola oil does when it’s heated too much. So it’s safer and better for your heath.
And in case any trolls want to jump on me for saying this, it’s easy to verify it - just search it on the internet.
PS - there’s no Roundup or glyphosate in extra light virgin oil, either - and apparently they cause some form of cancer. The EU has started monitoring ALL foods containing canola, to see if they can detect traces of glyphosate - including foods that are poorly labelled and don’t disclose what oils they contain, and other foods that may have failed to disclose whether or not they contain canola or any other oils.

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canola and other seed oils - bad toxic stuff - processed ++++
Cold pressed olive oil - no processing, good omega 3 omega 6 ratio

First website below is Australian. He’s a Keto doctor but you don’t have to like Keto to appreciate his advice and information on oils

To paraphrase from second website

Aside from “healthy whole grains,” vegetable oils and margarine are some of the most misunderstood and over-recommended foods in the health community.

Vegetable oils (and margarine, made from these oils) are oils extracted from seeds like the rapeseed (canola oil) soybean (soybean oil), corn, sunflower, safflower, etc. They were practically non-existent in our diets until the early 1900s when new chemical processes allowed them to be extracted.

Unlike butter or coconut oil, these vegetable oils can’t be extracted just by pressing or separating naturally. They must be chemically removed, deodorized, and altered. These are some of the most chemically altered foods in our diets, yet they get promoted as healthy.

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Whether or not they have merit I doubt those blogs are by themselves scientifically sound expert opinions, although they are interesting ‘food for thought’.

WellnessMama.com is the culmination of her thousands of hours of research and all posts are medically reviewed and verified by the Wellness Mama research team ’ Seems to be a self approving ‘activist’ of sorts…

The Diet Doctor is similarly circularly self-certifying.

It’s written by Jennifer Callihan and published December 15, 2018. It was medically reviewed by Dr. Bret Scher, MD, on December 14, 2018. The ‘review’ is by

My take is they are essentially blogsters with causes that might or might not hold water rather than true unbiased expert opinions.

Are there some peer reviews or blind studies to support these articles?

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Agree with you re self auditing from wellness mama
https://openheart.bmj.com/content/openhrt/5/2/e000898.full.pdf

Not a study just a hypothesis

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This might be significant if some evidence was provided that the extraction processes used are harmful. As it stands it is just a generalised expansion of the naturalistic fallacy, that “natural” foods (whatever that means) are OK and “unnatural” are not.

The general tenor of the advice is towards saturated fats and away from unsaturated fats. If you want to contradict current medical advice you need to show me peer reviewed articles in reputable journals.

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An article regarding cooking oils which advises that extra virgin olive oil is the most healthy choice.

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I only cooked it once in the oven - still trying to clean it
I now cook it on the barbeque!!!

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Nice to see you again, Veronica!

Oven bags help me to keep my oven clean @veronica.popplewell

Pork roast is a bit tricky, but online tips suggest it can be done.

I use those mostly for chicken, potatoes and veggies, and am amazed at the browning of the outside while all the juices and fats are trapped in for a more tender and flavoursome cooking.
And no oven splatters.

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I sometimes use a mesh dome cover over the roasting pan and frying pans for larger roasts and for grilled/fried foods that like to spatter eg bacon. This captures the vast majority of the spatter and allows the moisture to dissipate.

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Or if one isn’t baking in a very high temperature oven (<200-220°C - check the temperature rating of he baking paper), baking paper as a cover also works well. If cooking in a high temp oven, aluminium foil also works a treat to stop splatters.

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I’ve used nothing for a long time now - since I can no longer see through the glass window, it’s a bit like Schrodinger’s Oven now, clean or not clean … until I open the door that is …

Maybe the time has come …

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As long as the cat is not inside.

Some oven cleaning tips that I have posted previously.

Looks like your weekend is sorted.

image

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How about “so what”? Increasingly over time, the “food” manufacturers have taken to the side streets. Mostly, these days, they don’t tell you “which” oil. They just say things like “olive and vegetable oils”, so you are lulled to sleep - in their theoretical world - by the reference to an oil you WOULD be prepared to eat, and whatever else they choose to add as an oil is “camouflaged” by the term “vegetable oils”.

Well seriously guys - what other forms of oil ARE there? They’d scarcely have the absolute gall to fill their faux foodstuffs with “mineral oils”. I suppose they could add “animal oils”. Hmm - don’t even suggest it to them!

What I would like to see is a mandatory requirement to say WHICH oils and in WHAT quantities. THEY know - WE don’t - THEY aren’t going to eat it - they expect US to eat it - and rock bottom minimum, they owe us a truthful and accurate statement of what it is, that they expect us to eat.

The chatter about which oils are ‘good’, which are ‘bad’, which are ‘better’ and which are ‘worse’ is merely a distraction. WE ought to have the right to make the actual decision. At the moment, we can’t - and that’s their fault. They should be taken off the shelves of supermarkets until they DO make proper disclosure.

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Traditionally, one would never cook with virgin olive oil. It contains a lot of fibrous matter which imparts the green colour and flavour. It’s used just as a dressings to salads and certain meats and fish. The fibrous matter burns readily spoiling the dish. We love to cook with olive oil. I wanted to buy Aussie and noticed that Cobram markets only extra virgin olive oil but claim it’s suitable for cooking. I raised the issue of the fibrous matter with Cobram. They claim they use a new cold pressing technique that’s fairly unique to our market, that leaves their extra virgin olive oil suitable for cooking. We tried it and yes indeed, it works well. It’s a huge boon for us to now be able to get that lovely strong olive flavour in all our cooking. We go one step further. Into each new drum of oil, we put in one clove of garlic. It just adds that little extra flavour.
One proviso, we never use olive oil in Asian cooking. It just makes it taste weird. We use peanut oil for Asian.

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Cobram is fantastic as is Red Island.

We have been using both since they were available.

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