Right Fats, Right Oils
Gone are the times when eating healthy meant “low-fat” or “fat-free.” That was throwing out the baby with the bath water. The right fats are essential for balanced hormones, stable mood and behavior, healthy skin and heart, keeping inflammation at bay and more. It’s a good idea to get your fats from whole food sources such as raw nuts and seeds, avocado, eggs, safer fish, grass fed poultry and meats. Yet, most of us still cook with oil. So what kind oil is best for cooking?
I recommend coconut oil, grapeseed oil and ghee for sauteing and baking. Coconut oil, grapeseed oil and ghee tolerate high heat without burning or becoming rancid, unlike other oils.Ghee is pure butter fat, made by boiling butter until the milk solids settle out. Coconut oil is rich in anti-inflammatory fatty acids, but lends a sweet taste that may or may not be desirable. Grapeseed oil is rich in antioxidants and has a mild nutty flavor that you won’t taste in baked goods. Ghee is an excellent replacement for butter when sauteing. Baking recipes will need to be adjusted for it, however. Avoid coconut and grapeseed oils that are heat or solvent extracted. The label should say extra virgin, or expeller-pressed.
So what about olive oil? All my 1980’s cookbooks use extra virgin olive oil for sauteing. We now know that extra virgin olive oil loses it nutritional value and becomes rancid when heated even slightly. So, use it straight out of the bottle in salad dressing, for dipping bread, and drizzled over foods for flavor. “Cold pressed, extra virgin” increases the likelihood that the oil is rich in antioxidants and that the fatty acids are not rancid. It should come in a dark bottle to prevent light from damaging it.
A friend from France makes this simple, wonderful aioli. Some define aioli as a garlic mayonnaise, which doesn’t do it justice. Aioli has nothing to do with and is far more elegant than Hellmann’s or Miracle Whip. After chopping two heads of garlic and placing them in a mortar, he slowly added oil and salt as he ground the garlic with the pestle. We drizzled the emulsion over oven roasted fingerling potatoes sprinkled with cayenne pepper. Easy and so delicious!
This work by Bethany Klug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
