Cooking with olive oil, cheaper way if you're interested?!

meritaten

very interesting - I love the olive oil (specially selected range but it was still less than £3 a bottle) I got from Aldi a couple of weeks back - but that is for 'drizzling' and roasting veg! Though its so delicious I do dip bread in it just to eat as is!
I stir fry a lot and olive oil just doesnt perform well at the high temps. so I use sunflower oil. I hate the taste of corn oil, and havent seen safflower oil in my local shops so cant comment. I dont use generic 'vegetable' oils because I dont know whats in them!
oh - and when I want the taste of butter - I use real butter - not the substitutes. I have said for years that in future the medical boffins are going to realise that real butter is NOT the evil substance they say it is - its the substitutes!

Herbyme

maman, i have bought that spray oil, does a home made spray work just as well? what ratio of oil to water do you use? can you just fill up the original spray bottle again, do you think?

ChocClare

I've not heard of this before either: we always buy olive oil in France and it's one of the things we buy in enough bulk not to risk running out of it. I use it to cook with on its own or with a knob of butter.

I once did some market research for a very well-known margarine company which promotes the "health" benefits of its product. As with most margarines, it had a sell-by date, which was usually to do with the top surface of the margarine going darker on contact with air, rather than the product itself going off. They also sometimes had to repackage margarine where eg a promotion on the tub was finished.

While we were doing the research, the company showed one of my colleagues around factory. We were slightly horrified when she told us that the margarine was reheated by being chucked into a vat while still in the tub - the plastic tubs then floated to the surface and were discarded, the vat of marg skimmed, then pumped into new tubs to be sold as this "healthful" product again... :eek:

Unsurprisingly, I have never bought margarine since (not that I did then, but this was before "spreadable" butter, so we used to have something easy-to-spread for sandwiches). I now just don't have "butter" on my sandwiches at all...

Finefoot

ewwww! they take it back and repackage it?!!

ChocClare

Finefoot wrote: »

ewwww! they take it back and repackage it?!!

This was in 1989 or 1990 so they may well not have this practice now. The fact that they did then was certainly enough to ensure that I never ate the stuff again!

It's weird how things go in phases - just recently they were saying that eggs are "no longer" bad for us because of cholesterol levels: makes me wonder what's next!

I read two separate things recently (ie I read them in different places and by different authors): the first was that our ancestors ate a diet high in saturated fats and did not suffer from heart disease; that the link between saturated fat and heart disease was "discovered" by American research commissioned by their government and sponsored and paid for by... companies who make polyunsaturated margarine... Actually, my take on that one is that our ancestors could happily eat a diet dripping in saturated fat with impunity because they a) walked everywhere and b) didn't have central heating or "labour saving" devices!

The second thing was new medical research which suggested that cholesterol is part of the body's immune system; that the body produces it to help cure eg hardened arteries, heart disease etc., which is why autopsies show elevated levels of cholesterol in those people. So if your cholesterol level is high, that is a symptom that your body is helping you to fight your eg heart disease, and by lowering it through diet or statins, you are perhaps putting your body more at risk and doing the opposite of what you should be doing. Allegedly. :eek:

Anyway, interesting, I thought. Well, I thought so!

maman

ChocClare wrote: »

I've not heard of this before either: we always buy olive oil in France and it's one of the things we buy in enough bulk not to risk running out of it. I use it to cook with on its own or with a knob of butter.

...

That's exactly what I used to do but decided that the Lidl oil is every bit as good and cheaper. (Sadly this is true most of the shopping I used to do in France with the exception of tins of confit du canard)

maman

carolinerunner wrote: »

maman, i have bought that spray oil, does a home made spray work just as well? what ratio of oil to water do you use? can you just fill up the original spray bottle again, do you think?

Can't remember exactly but I think about half and half.

Gigervamp

I was going to say about pomace being good for use in soapmaking, but Seakay beat me to it!

anguk wrote: »

Reading just a couple of articles is enough to put me off!
http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/faq/pomaceoilfaq/

I noticed that this link specifically mentioned that it was Spanish pomace oil that was being withdrawn. I wonder how the Spanish extraction process differs from others that lead to the carcinogens being in the oil.