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Greetings from Fat Gold!
This is the time of year we’re tempted to describe as “the calm before the storm”… except it’s not that calm! The harvest is coming; by the end of November, we’ll have a fresh supply of Fat Gold, enough for all of 2023.
You may recall that we bought an olive mill. In late August, at a factory near Florence, its components were packed onto pallets and loaded into a 40-foot shipping container. That container was carried to the port of Livorno and lifted onto a ship, whose progress we tracked all September long.
The ship made it across the Atlantic, dodging hurricanes. After stops at several ports of call—Mexico, Texas, now Virginia—our mill has been unloaded, and will soon begin the final leg of its journey, by rail, to California.
Given the timing, we won’t be able to use our new mill for most of our production this year, but we are hoping to manage a few batches, which will give us the information we need to prepare for next year, when we’ll do ALL of our milling ourselves.
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835, J. M. W. Turner
If you have ever investigated the differences between cooking oils, you have heard about the dreaded SMOKE POINT.
The story goes like this:
Oils have different “smoke points,” or temperatures at which they begin to smoke. You never want that to happen (the story goes) so you should choose an oil with a smoke point above the temperature at which you’ll be cooking.
At the very least, this story is incomplete. It might just be wrong.
The oils with really high smoke points are all refined: canola oil, vegetable oil, and peanut oil. They have high smoke points because they have been “pre-burned” for your convenience, processed with scalding heat and chemicals.
It’s like buying a loaf of bread that’s been charred to a crisp, advertised with the promise that it has a high “toast point.” Mmm, thanks, I guess?
In many of the charts you’ll find online, “olive oil” is listed with a smoke point of 350-375 degrees F. If you’ve been following along with Fat Gold for a while, this ought to raise your eyebrows. “Olive oil”? What kind? Refined? Virgin? Extra virgin? High-quality extra virgin?
You’ve learned by now that there’s huge variation, even among olive oils that are certified extra virgin.
Good news: the antioxidant polyphenols that make a high-quality extra virgin olive oil tasty and healthy also make it sturdy under heat. (If you’re new to polyphenols, you can learn all about them here.) Oxidation is oxidation, whether it’s slow (the oil exposed to heat and oxygen over long months on a pantry shelf) or fast (the oil exposed to heat and oxygen over short minutes in a frying pan).
The same polyphenols that protect your oil from the slow kind of oxidation will protect it from the fast kind, too.
Conversely, an extra virgin olive oil that’s poorly-made or past its prime, well on its way to rancidity, won’t stand up to heat very well.
So, we encourage you to consider an oil’s “oxidative stability” rather than its “smoke point.” That phrase isn’t as catchy, but oxidation is what we care about, because it is oxidation that produces the compounds that taste bad and hurt your body.
In a 2018 paper titled Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils During Heating, the authors write:
Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) and other common cooking oils were heated up to [464 degrees F] and exposed to [356 degrees F] for 6 hours, with samples assessed at various times, testing smoke point, oxidative stability, free fatty acids, polar compounds, fatty acid profiles and UV coefficients. EVOO yielded low levels of polar compounds and oxidative by-products, in contrast to the high levels of by-products generated for oils such as canola oil.
(Yes, this paper was published by researchers at a place called Modern Olives Laboratory Services, which might make you wonder, hmm, perhaps they are not totally unbiased in this matter. That’s probably true! But, even if you quibble with their data or conclusions, the fact that extra virgin olive oil is comparable to refined oils in its sturdiness under heat undermines the whole storyline about smoke point.)
Remember, too, that “cooking at 400 degrees F” never means “causing all of your ingredients to uniformly reach 400 degrees F.” In your oven, the air is 400 degrees F; your food is somewhere below that level, sometimes far below, as the heat is absorbed and shared between many tasty molecules.
For our part, we use Fat Gold at all temperatures, from room temperature (glugged on salad) to 350 degrees F (slathered on vegetables) to 500 degrees F (bathing the crust of a Detroit-style pizza), always with great results.
(Don’t forget that we have a stockpile of ideas for ways you can use your Fat Gold!)
It all comes down to this: the same polyphenols that make extra virgin olive oil so hardy under heat are absorbed first by your food, and then by your body. Those polyphenols are tasty and healthy! So, if the price of a high smoke point is a refined oil, stripped of this flavor and nutrition: that price is too high.
–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan