Let me expand and revise my comments. I typically use olive oil or ghee for moderate temperature sauteing. The choice depends on the flavor I'm looking for. Sometimes I use butter, but only if I'm looking for the extra browning of the milk solids.

I have some high temp applications, also. Browning beef, chicken, fish. I want a really high smoke point, so that was my main criteria. The grape seed oil I've used in the past smoked too low. (La Tourangelle. Not labelled with smoke point. Don't remember how much heat it could take, but not enough.) This lead to high heat organic oils from Spectrum. I used to use canola, but switched to sunflowers.

The indoor air pollution problem of polyunsaturated oils is not something I knew about. At the store now. The highest smoke point (as given on the label) I could find on the shelf is a whole foods 365 grape seed oil. It's 475.

For some proteins, my approach is to use the oven to heat a pan and oil to 450, then insert food, keep on high burner for 3 min a side. Sunflower and canola can do this without smoking, at least the offerings from Spectrum. I wouldn't trust most olive oil at that temp, unless it was labelled such.

The generic smoke point charts are not much good. A bottle of avocado oil I just saw was labelled in the low 400's, certainly not the 500+ shown in some charts.

I will.report back with the 365 grape seed oil results.

 

 


- mark 6-29-2016 8:45 pm





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.