• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

oil and how about it?

rangrz

rangrz

Bluelighter
Joined
Mar 23, 2008
Messages
11,686
Location
Canada eh, we get milk in bags.
no, I am not talking about petroleum or stuff like pine oil made into turpentine. I mean cooking oil. What sorts of oil do people here like to use? What ways do you use it? suggestions on oils to try?

If you don't use it cause of "lol cholesterol" please refrain from trolling. I also submit that most oils are fairly unsaturated and do carry a lot of calorific value which is valuable if you engage in a lot of physical action. (I myself do)

The oil I use most is olive oil, as my general purpose frying oil, as well as to sprinkle on bread (either for flavor or to restore a dry loaf) along with some salt, pepper (black|chilli) and to make salad dressings with garlic and vinegar as co-factors. I think it has a wonderful flavor and is suited to many cooking tasks.

I like grapeseed oil to use as above in salad dressings, it has thinner viscosity and a distinct taste that I find om nom nom and suggest people try.

Peanut oil is imo well suited to frying beef because of its fairly high spontaneous ignition and smoke points and unobtrusive flavor.

Who can forget sesame oil. (Aside from being good to dissolve THC in like is done in Marinol lol) it obviously lends a unique flavor that is common in some east Asian dishes and is hard to replace.
 
My g/f seems to have a small obsession with essential healing oils. Any ailment I have she has something that will fix it and truthfully some of it has been working. She calls it her medicine bag and she probably has like 30 different oils. Now that is a far cry from the 'medicine bags' I am used to but its movement in a positive direction.

http://www.youngliving.com/en_US/index.html
 
I've been using coconut oil for frying lately, with good results. Fairly high smoke point, and although it is mostly saturated (a rarity for plant oils) the chain length makes it liquid at body temp, meaning that the only health 'problem' is that it has a higher overall density than other oils. It's also great for skincare (just ask Mariacallas, if she's still around these parts).

For dressing oils, I'll either use a fruity extra virgin olive oil or more likely some Udo's oil blend. Tasty stuff, and the best ratio of omega 3:6:9 that you'll get in a plant fat. High-heat searing is all about either peanut or grapeseed oil, due to their very high smoke points.
 
I use coconut oil for lip balm, it's amazing, and rose hip oil for my face.

To cook I use rice bran oil, and I love olive oil dressing for a salad
 
Dave said:
although it is mostly saturated (a rarity for plant oils)
Click to expand...

Coconut oil is actually the most saturated oil in culinary use (outside of fully hydrogenated plant oils), its fatty acids being more saturated than lard's.

the chain length makes it liquid at body temp, meaning that the only health 'problem' is that it has a higher overall density than other oils.
Click to expand...

Do saturated oils exert negative effects on health by way of these types of physical properties?

ebola
 
This is all I use.
img-thing
 
olive oil allllll the way, extra virgin is usually best. tho for frying it has a low smoke point, so you have to be careful. pumpkin seed oil is good too. oh and truffle oil
 
@ebola!: I've heard, and this may be completely out to lunch, that fats that are solid at body temperature are more likely to cause plaques in arterial walls than those that are not, from simple phase separation and coagulation. One would need to eat a lot of said fats for this to be plausible, say... a high animal-fat diet.

Apparently, due to its incredibly high saturated fat content (you're right ebola!, it's something like > 98% saturated medium chain triglycerides), it is supposed to make an excellent substitute for lard/shortening in baking. I've yet to test this out though.
 
Husband: extra virgin olive oil only
Son: grapeseed oil or olive oil
Me: whichever one they leave next to the stove;)
 
Dave said:
@ebola!: I've heard, and this may be completely out to lunch, that fats that are solid at body temperature are more likely to cause plaques in arterial walls than those that are not, from simple phase separation and coagulation. One would need to eat a lot of said fats for this to be plausible, say... a high animal-fat diet.
Click to expand...

That viscosity would influence the accumulation of arterial plaque sounds plausible to this layperson, but I honestly don't know enough to say. However, given that systemic increase in cholesterol and triglycerides mediates much of saturated fats' cardiotoxicity, viscosity can't be all or even most of the story.

Apparently, due to its incredibly high saturated fat content (you're right ebola!, it's something like > 98% saturated medium chain triglycerides), it is supposed to make an excellent substitute for lard/shortening in baking. I've yet to test this out though.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't doubt it: for example, my vegan mock Alfredo, which is coconut milk based, turns out as rich as traditional Alfredo.

ebola
 
Heh, no, I'm sure that it isn't. I was told that tidbit from an old-time vegan lady in a vegan cookery course. She knew of some cool ingredients, and was vegan in the far north over a decade ago, but she was a bit backwards on her food chemistry, and wasn't very culinarily sophisticated. I had to actually stop her in the middle of a tirade to explain what trans fatty acids actually were, how they were made and so on, as she was going on a tinfoil-hat tirade about them. So, while I think that the melting temperature of fats may play a role in plaque formation, it's obviously only used as a quick-and-dirty 'rule of thumb' rather than the whole story.

Coconut milk alfredo, you say? Hmmm. I was thinking of trying to develop a cashew cream version, but that may well be far easier.
 
I don't understand why people use olive oil so much. It's expensive, and it has a strong flavour that I often don't want. Extra virgin is great for a salad dressing, but why anyone would want to fry an egg it in is beyond me. Personally, I'm in love with butter. I know it's bad for me, but it's so unbelievably delicious.
 
Olive oil and sesame oil are the most useful IME.

rangrz, you've got a great point when it comes to Asian dishes and such, that sesame flavor has to be in there.
 
I wouldn't think bulk melting tep/viscosity would have a have large effect on plaque formation... lipids are not transported in big globs floating around in your blood vessels. There is probably some arcane metabolic process with respect to lipase or albumin or the other lipid transport or metabolism products that would explain why saturated fats form plaques.

Putting a pile of chilli peppers in peanut oil makes for a wickedly spicy condiment/flavoring. The capsaicin is highly lipophillic and dissolves out into the oil very well.
 
I like the flavor of olive oil. I can taste many of the less expensive oils that aren't supposed to add any flavor and I don't care for it.

Vader said:
I don't understand why people use olive oil so much. It's expensive, and it has a strong flavour that I often don't want.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top