Real good fry oil

The name of this blog comes from a funny little passion of mine. See, I always used to cook with canola oil. When I was a kid, my mom had a giant plastic jug of the stuff in our pantry, and it’s cheap as dirt, so it seemed like the obvious option. But the trouble with canola oil is that it tastes like canola oil. Cloying and plasticky. It’s just not good.

What else to cook with, though? Olive oil is delicious, but too temperamental to use on high heat. Butter likewise. Sunflower oil is the obvious one, and I used that for a while when I finally got fed up with canola. It’s unobjectionable enough — high smoke point, no strong taste.

But everything changed when I discovered the lost history of lard. See, lard used to be the go-to cooking fat in the anglosphere. It’s a pork byproduct, so there’s lots of it to go around. It’s saturated, like butter, which makes it lovely for baking and frying, but unlike butter, it has a high smoke point, so you can cook basically anything with it. Alas! nobody uses lard anymore. It’s catastrophically unhealthy, or so we’ve been told. But I learned a couple years back that this narrative about lard is a cultural fiction derived from Crisco’s marketing campaign, among other things. Lard is actually no worse than any other saturated fat, and saturated fats aren’t as bad as we thought in the first place.

Lard was a game-changer for me — food fried in saturated fat is just lovely. Unsaturated vegetable oils can leave a bit of a greasy sheen on fried foods, but saturated fats fry crispy and dry. I thought I had reached the end of my little cooking-fat quest; that lard was fry cook enlightenment. Until I found out how butter really works.

See, butter is unlike other saturated fats in that it has a very low smoke point. It burns easily, so you can’t cook with it on high heat. But that’s pretty strange, no? Saturated fats are all pretty similar on a chemical level; why should butter be the outlier here?

The answer is, it’s not. Not really. You make butter by churning all the fat out of milk; it’s largely comprised of simple milk fat. Largely being the key term. There are actually three components: milk fat, milk solids, and a little bit of milky water left over. When butter burns, it’s the milk solids that are burning. Milk fat actually has an extremely high smoke point.

So, is pure milk fat accessible to cooks? Well, if you melt a stick of butter, it separates into milky water at the bottom, milk fat in the middle, and foamy milk solids at the top. If you skim the solids off the top and then skim the fat off the water, you wind up with transparent yellow clarified butter — pure milk fat, more or less. After it cools, it solidifies into an opaque yellow puck, like a beeswax candle, which can be stored at room temperature like any other cooking oil.

I started cooking with clarified butter last week, and I love it. It behaves like lard, but it’s buttery. I’m having a great time. I live near an Asian supermarket, so I’ve been eating a lot of fried dumplings lately. Excellent, fried in butter. But we can still go further.

See, in South Asian cuisine, there’s this thing ghee, which is a different sort of clarified butter. Instead of melting the butter and skimming off its component parts, you boil the butter until the water evaporates and the milk solids caramelize. Then, you strain out the little caramelized chunks and you’re left with ghee: purer still than clarified butter, and with a characteristic nutty flavour. When my current batch of clarified butter runs out, I’m going to try making ghee, and I’m pretty excited.

After that, my new frontier in cooking fats: coconut oil.

— Pan-fried, 2021-03-04. Back to top