I'm avoiding anything that involves petrochemicals now (so most of the standard vegetable oils), but what about - for example - cold pressed sunflower or rapeseed? Which nut oils are well regarded? What are alternatives to olive oil if I want a different mayonnaise? When looking at coconut oil, is it raw , virgin or just regular? Does anyone actually use tallow or lard?
etc etc.Really curious what people are using
(confession: I haven't bought coconut oil, yet; too hipsterish for me)
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Subtle_badger
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Avocado oil for salad dressings is lovely. Expensive though. Otherwise olive oil and butter, and coconut oil for when I make spiced nuts (I hear it’s great for your hair as well but not tried that!)
I use butter, coconut oil, olive oil, and (simply because it's left over from Christmas) duck fat. The duck fat has a noticeable duck flavour, so it's really only good for heavy, meaty dishes.
VCO is really nice. You can't use it for everything, but you'd be surprised how many things taste better with a hint of coconut flavour. A mix of VCO and butter is good for omelettes.
I occasionally use unrefined palm oil if I can get it. Thanks to the (very successful) smear campaign against it, sustainably-grown palm oil is tarred with the same brush as the other sort. Like VCO it has a subtle flavour that really adds an extra dimension to certain dishes, although the lower-quality stuff can taste weird. Try it in curries.
We used to run a restaurant that produced a fair amount of pig oil from breakfast service. I used to use that all the time, but since we no longer have the restaurant, I don't.
Great question!! I have a bottle of rapeseed oil that I am too tight to throw out. It says it is cold pressed and I do look for organic but I haven't found any yet. And I have this thing about trying to reduce food air miles - this rapeseed oil is produced on the Isle of Wight - not too far away, whereas olive oil.... Also I didn't think you should fry with extra virgin olive oil so I was looking at NOT extra virgin olive oil but that said it is a blend of virgin and refined, so that put me off. So at the moment, I'm using ghee for curries, coconut oil for stir fries, butter and rapeseed oil for other frying. Do try the coconut oil, it is delicious.
Back to stir fries - back in the bad old days, when I used to make stir fries, I would always add some toasted sesame oil when I had turned the heat off. It added the most delicious flavour. I'm guessing it's a no no now?
As to lard, I would use half lard/half butter when I made shortcrust pastry. And, if I didn't have any goose fat left over from Christmas, I would use lard for roasties and roast parsnips.....ah, those were the days
We just use olive oil (hand-picked), coconut, butter & avocado. Tend to use coconut or avocado for higher temperature when cooking like stir-fry tonight.
We never use rapeseed any more because (as far as I know) it's sprayed of with glyphosate to desiccate it prior to harvest. I know there's organic, but never seen any or know how it is produced.
That's another big plus for low-carb / no-grain, as most grain nowadays is sprayed off with weed-killer, not always but you never know with the weather being so varied.
I love Primal Kitchen Garlic Aioli Mayo. vitacost.com/primal-kitchen... - Expensive. Yummy treat for me. I went from low carb to Keto a few months ago. My doctor has been supportive. I am newly in remission after a few recurrences.
Yes I have only organic and avo, or olive. Sometimes I use coconut, but want to keep the saturated ones down. Avo for cooking and olive for other. Olive doesn't like the heat.
Thanks for the responses. If you aren't aware, a lot of seed oils are extracted using hexane, a petro chemical. I have been pretty smug retrospectively about my diet over the last several decades. I never switched to margarine (I worked out that no one had proven this factory gloop was better than butter we had been eating for millennia, so just cut down on butter, while strenuously avoiding marg. Similarly when I went low fat, I never ate the sugar based processed replacements, I just went without.
But I got got by canola oil. I took the propaganda that it was basically equivalent to olive oil, and when I moved to the UK, I took to rapeseed oil as there was no canola. I even got excited when I realised that the cheapest "vegetable" oil was rapeseed, which in my confusion I thought was olive oil without the snob factor.
But now I know. The oil isn't natural. It's extracted with hexane, a petroleum product. I do not understand how this is part of our food chain, and not required to be mentioned on labels.
It's not clear what other oils use hexane. Most seed oils, I think. But maybe even non-virgin avocado oils. More research is required.
The solvent extraction doesn't bother me as such. There's no hexane left in the finished product. It just baffles me that people who ought to know better are actually promoting this highly-processed product as healthier than any oil that humans have ever eaten before. And don't get me started on margarine.
"Vegetable oils" would have been physically impossible to produce prior to the industrial age. Same with margarine. Nobody has ever eaten them, at least not in any significant quantity. The idea that these might be supremely good for us is ... unlikely, at best.
I'm not going to argue that because something is natural then it must be good for us. But since we've been eating natural fats for millennia without any apparent consequences, I don't see any need for a technological "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist.
Hemlock is natural. Opium is from poppies. Marijuana is a leaf as is tobacco. See also raw potatoes, deadly nightshade & yew berries. Less dramatically think honey & sugar cane.
But the effects of hemlock and tobacco are fairly obvious. The effects of saturated fat haven't shown themselves despite billions of $ of research funding ...
By the way, have you had any more hypo episodes? Are you "keto" at moment or lowish-carb? Just curious how you're getting on ...
We are at cross purposes. I do not mind industrial scale manufacturing, as long as they are using simple techniques. It's using processes to change the underlying nature of food using chemicals or temperatures or pressures that are impossible even in the best equipped kitchens.
Here is the rule that is forming in my head: I want to stop buying food that I couldn't possibly make in home from natural ingredients. So as I could theoretically take fresh milk, let it stand, skim off the cream and churn it into butter. I cannot bubble hydrogen through vegetable oils in the presence of a catalyst to form saturated bonds, so I am not eating trans fats. I could macerated and press olives and get virgin olive oil. If you gave me rapeseed, there is no way I could do any of the processes described in the link above, so that's a no on most rapeseed oils.
Etc. Ugh, I seem to have just removed the possibility of patisserie from my future, because I could never grind flour that fine. 😢
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