Olive oil

catznine · 12 January 2005 at 4:44PM

Thank you scrimperjan I shall try some almond oil!

nabowla · 12 January 2005 at 5:22PM

Olive oil from 'northern' countries (France etc) is generally milder than olive oils from 'southern' countries (Spain, Portugual etc). Apparently it's got something to do with the strength of the sunshine to which the olives are exposed.

Italians tend to use ordinary olive oil for general cooking & extra virgin for dressings, drizzling on ciabatta etc. There is a noticable difference in taste between expensive & cheap oil - I thought my Italian cookery teacher was just being a bit snobby until she made us taste the different oils! If you want a good oil for a salad, I'd wait until one of the supermarkets has a promotion and then buy an expensive bottle at a discount price.

filigree_2 · 13 January 2005 at 2:58AM

If someone wants olive oil for it's monounsaturated qualities, an alternative is rapeseed oil which has the highest mono etc content of any veg oil after olive oil. The good news is that most brands of economy veg oil are pure rapeseed. It's bland and suitable for all sorts of frying although it's no use for salad dressings.

I think there's some kind of ecopolitics argument against rapeseed oil, whether you want to buy it is up to you and your conscience.

I agree that there's not much point using olive oil for absolutely everything, save it for recipes where the oil's flavour is important. You can't taste it in curry