this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
274 points (98.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43952 readers
685 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I once took a cooking class and the teacher was always "it's not necessary to invest in expensive oils, the cheapest oil will always do for cooking".
"These fries taste like used motor oil?!"
"Thanks for noticing. I took a class."
As long as the oil you are using has the right smoke point. Different oils can get to different temperatures and are used for different things.
Can you expand on that? Which to use when?
Olive oil is a low smoke point. It's good in a salad dressing but bad to cook something like steak and terrible for frying foods. It burns at a temperature lower than you'd sear meats at. Low smoke point oils tend to be richer and more delicate in flavors.
Canola is a mid-high smoke point oil, it's good for searing meats and frying foods.
Safflower and avocado are a high smoke point oil. You can cook at a much higher temperature without burning the oil.
If you can find a place to watch it, there are a couple episodes of Good Eats where Alton Brown goes over the different types of oils and their usage. I find his show to be great at learning the whys behind a lot of the cooking choices and techniques.
Thanks so much.
Any idea about corn and sunflower oil? (I hope I got the names correct)
Both are high smoke point.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/800/cooking-oil-smoke-points.html
Thank you so much
Ooo there's a great video on Minute Food about vanilla extract vs synthetic vanilla. It basically comes down to: if you cook the vanilla, synthetic will taste the exact same, if you never heat up the vanilla it might be worth getting the real stuff.
I assume the same is probably true of most oils, if you use EVOO for salad dressings it might be worth it, but if you're using it to saute you might as well use sunflower oil and save some money.
I don't think I've ever even seen synthetic vanilla outside of extremely specialised professional shops. (Europe). Vanilla seems to be insanely expensive in the US for some reason.
I see it already the time as vanillin sugar for baking instead of vanilla/vanilla sugar. Much cheaper. Every supermarket here has it.
I haven't thought of looking at sugar as I do my own vanilla sugar. I'll check it out next time.