Olive oil being a struggle session is just so frustrating to me. As someone who has a deep love for food and cooking, it hurts quite a bit to see how the internet has pretty much re-birthed cooking snobbery in this entirely new way. I am an exceptionally knowledgeable cook, having worked in a million different types of places and even fully running a place for a little bit, lots of research into food science and such. I like the nerdy side of cooking that the internet has brought out, but the snobbery of olive oil’s smoke point is a great example of when it starts just getting into re-establishing french style elitism based on racism and classism that has kept the true heroes of culinary history out of the public eye. Most of the great dishes we have, some of the smartest food practices around today, were made by illiterate, uneducated slaves and workers, and those people broke a ton of culinary “rules”. Modern internet cooks stand on the shoulders of giants and spit on them. The guy who invented modern barbecue ribs was an illiterate slave making food for his owner, where his owner took credit for everything he did. It wasn’
One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t. It’s why we see white people essentially try to claim Creole food by making some changes and calling it cajun, and they do it by legitimizing and de-legitimizing certain techniques.
Or how historically, Central America uses very little oil in their cooking, preferring the flavor of char over a maillard reaction done with oil. Now the delicious food of Central America is being lost over time because cooks are listening to these online people and replacing unique flavor elements from their cultures with french cooking practice. THAT is why white people can’t make tacos, it’s literally because they’re cooking like white people and have had “cook everything in oil” drilled into them from the start of their cooking. It would be one thing if food was just changing with the times, people having different palettes, but that’s not the case, otherwise those gentrified white people taco shops would be a hit amongst Hispanic people.
I see the whole olive oil debate, and similar discussions as a way to dismiss cooks with unique techniques and their food. People saying you can’t fry in olive oil are implicitly saying that pretty much the entire middle east and medeterranian were just burning absolutely everything they cooked until white people made canola oil. It’s re-establishing elitist cooking standards with bad information. So everybody’s food is becoming more and more tasteless, more Americanized, switching to more neutral oils, all in the name of “not burning” something that isn’t even actually burning. It’s annoying.
I do a lot of foodposting on my account. Like Mao said, talk on things that you’re well educated on and you’ll never make an ass of yourself. Nobody will argue with me over olive oil frying because there’s very little to challenge on well informed takes built from empirically testing books and experiencing things first hand. I’m very well educated on food, and can write at length about history, techniques, and unique flavors I’ve gotten to try.
Do you happen to know anything about stir frying? I’ve been reading up on it a bit recently and it seems like traditional stir frying would smoke the shit out of the oils available in China at the time.
Not as much as I’d like, I will give that as a primer. However, I do know general food history and can extrapolate. So from what I do know, Seasame and Tea Seed oil probably would have been the choices. These have higher smokepoints of 450-500 degrees, if they were cooked outside, smoke wouldn’t have been an issue. Many stir fries are based on SE asian spring veggies, aka when you wouldn’t want a fire running in your house the whole day. We cook inside now, so smoke is way bigger of an issue. Plus, modern Chinese cuisine also creates a shit ton of smoke inside. Fried rice and stir fries requires a smoking hot piece of carbon steel. If it was cold enough to put a fire inside, they probably just made soup from their leftovers instead of a stir fry to avoid the smoke, because nobody wants their house full of smoke.
So yeah, they were probably creating an obscene amount of smoke and didn’t care because they were outside. Many modern home cooks suggest cooking stir fries using their wok over the grill to avoid the indoor smoke. If they weren’t, it’s because Stir Fry doesn’t necessarily require the super high heat we associate it with
I thought “real” stir fry required more heat than what a typical western stove can give. I’ve kind of used that as an excuse for my attempts at stir-frys being mid at best.
To be fair, the “you can’t stir fry in a western kitchen” is a half-remembered claim from an old book about Chinese cuisine written by an English woman, so I’m not hard to convince otherwise.
I’ve heard this before, but I’ve also heard the counterpoint that a modern Chinese home isn’t going to have a high BTU stove either. My next step is to watch a bunch of cooking videos on Youku to see what modern Chinese people are doing.
Here’s Wang Gang, a world class Chinese chef, cooking literally next to a rice paddy. He normally works in a professional kitchen in Sichuan but for some of his vids he’s at home with his family and they have an outdoor stove setup.
hey i went on this journey a few years ago with fuscha dunlops cookbooks as a starting point and eventually machine translated recipies and leylalove is pretty much dead on. a combination of high smoke point oils, doing it fast and doing it outside are how you dont smoke yourself out.
iirc there’s a section in every grain of rice about stir frying. i’ll see if i can dig it up.
From some more reading, a wok probably isn’t worth using with a standard induction cooktop. Might be better off getting a carbon steel pan and accepting that it won’t be the same.
If you’re having to buy crap anyway, they make wok + burner combos that are either induction or gas.
No matter what you can use a normal thin walled, uncoated aluminum or stainless (or carbon steel if you can find it) to figure out if you even like stir frying and it suits your life.
Longtime cook who knows what the hell I’m doing here as well. And you said it perfectly. Having to explain at work that the marinated sundried tomato mix I made for pizzas were supposed to char in the oven just today was a fucking battle. That’s still in the white boy domain, but unless it’s meat doing any kinda charring or searing is just making burnt food to many
One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t.
This is basically true for every single thing from foods to animals to plants to insects
whites renamed them all and paid no attention to the actual native names the people had before
wikipedia needs to be occupied and completely changed by the JDPON
Olive oil being a struggle session is just so frustrating to me. As someone who has a deep love for food and cooking, it hurts quite a bit to see how the internet has pretty much re-birthed cooking snobbery in this entirely new way. I am an exceptionally knowledgeable cook, having worked in a million different types of places and even fully running a place for a little bit, lots of research into food science and such. I like the nerdy side of cooking that the internet has brought out, but the snobbery of olive oil’s smoke point is a great example of when it starts just getting into re-establishing french style elitism based on racism and classism that has kept the true heroes of culinary history out of the public eye. Most of the great dishes we have, some of the smartest food practices around today, were made by illiterate, uneducated slaves and workers, and those people broke a ton of culinary “rules”. Modern internet cooks stand on the shoulders of giants and spit on them. The guy who invented modern barbecue ribs was an illiterate slave making food for his owner, where his owner took credit for everything he did. It wasn’
One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t. It’s why we see white people essentially try to claim Creole food by making some changes and calling it cajun, and they do it by legitimizing and de-legitimizing certain techniques.
Or how historically, Central America uses very little oil in their cooking, preferring the flavor of char over a maillard reaction done with oil. Now the delicious food of Central America is being lost over time because cooks are listening to these online people and replacing unique flavor elements from their cultures with french cooking practice. THAT is why white people can’t make tacos, it’s literally because they’re cooking like white people and have had “cook everything in oil” drilled into them from the start of their cooking. It would be one thing if food was just changing with the times, people having different palettes, but that’s not the case, otherwise those gentrified white people taco shops would be a hit amongst Hispanic people.
I see the whole olive oil debate, and similar discussions as a way to dismiss cooks with unique techniques and their food. People saying you can’t fry in olive oil are implicitly saying that pretty much the entire middle east and medeterranian were just burning absolutely everything they cooked until white people made canola oil. It’s re-establishing elitist cooking standards with bad information. So everybody’s food is becoming more and more tasteless, more Americanized, switching to more neutral oils, all in the name of “not burning” something that isn’t even actually burning. It’s annoying.
More food posting pls
I do a lot of foodposting on my account. Like Mao said, talk on things that you’re well educated on and you’ll never make an ass of yourself. Nobody will argue with me over olive oil frying because there’s very little to challenge on well informed takes built from empirically testing books and experiencing things first hand. I’m very well educated on food, and can write at length about history, techniques, and unique flavors I’ve gotten to try.
Do you happen to know anything about stir frying? I’ve been reading up on it a bit recently and it seems like traditional stir frying would smoke the shit out of the oils available in China at the time.
Not as much as I’d like, I will give that as a primer. However, I do know general food history and can extrapolate. So from what I do know, Seasame and Tea Seed oil probably would have been the choices. These have higher smokepoints of 450-500 degrees, if they were cooked outside, smoke wouldn’t have been an issue. Many stir fries are based on SE asian spring veggies, aka when you wouldn’t want a fire running in your house the whole day. We cook inside now, so smoke is way bigger of an issue. Plus, modern Chinese cuisine also creates a shit ton of smoke inside. Fried rice and stir fries requires a smoking hot piece of carbon steel. If it was cold enough to put a fire inside, they probably just made soup from their leftovers instead of a stir fry to avoid the smoke, because nobody wants their house full of smoke.
So yeah, they were probably creating an obscene amount of smoke and didn’t care because they were outside. Many modern home cooks suggest cooking stir fries using their wok over the grill to avoid the indoor smoke. If they weren’t, it’s because Stir Fry doesn’t necessarily require the super high heat we associate it with
So I shouldn’t worry too much about my oil smoking, at least in terms of flavor?
Sesame oil is weird because a lot of people insist it shouldn’t be used as a cooking oil but that seems to be completely untrue.
Yep, smoke usually equals burning, but this isn’t the case with all oils. Trust your taste buds
I thought “real” stir fry required more heat than what a typical western stove can give. I’ve kind of used that as an excuse for my attempts at stir-frys being mid at best.
To be fair, the “you can’t stir fry in a western kitchen” is a half-remembered claim from an old book about Chinese cuisine written by an English woman, so I’m not hard to convince otherwise.
I’ve heard this before, but I’ve also heard the counterpoint that a modern Chinese home isn’t going to have a high BTU stove either. My next step is to watch a bunch of cooking videos on Youku to see what modern Chinese people are doing.
To this day, there are outdoor kitchens in China.
Here’s Wang Gang, a world class Chinese chef, cooking literally next to a rice paddy. He normally works in a professional kitchen in Sichuan but for some of his vids he’s at home with his family and they have an outdoor stove setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxpCVrwwF-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgYXRuQcniw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIsLgYy03YM
This is really cool, thanks!
hey i went on this journey a few years ago with fuscha dunlops cookbooks as a starting point and eventually machine translated recipies and leylalove is pretty much dead on. a combination of high smoke point oils, doing it fast and doing it outside are how you dont smoke yourself out.
iirc there’s a section in every grain of rice about stir frying. i’ll see if i can dig it up.
I’m now a little tempted to try using my induction cooktop outdoors…
Here it is!
I’ve never used induction burners with a wok. Be careful tossing it?
From some more reading, a wok probably isn’t worth using with a standard induction cooktop. Might be better off getting a carbon steel pan and accepting that it won’t be the same.
If you’re having to buy crap anyway, they make wok + burner combos that are either induction or gas.
No matter what you can use a normal thin walled, uncoated aluminum or stainless (or carbon steel if you can find it) to figure out if you even like stir frying and it suits your life.
Longtime cook who knows what the hell I’m doing here as well. And you said it perfectly. Having to explain at work that the marinated sundried tomato mix I made for pizzas were supposed to char in the oven just today was a fucking battle. That’s still in the white boy domain, but unless it’s meat doing any kinda charring or searing is just making burnt food to many
this comment rules
deleted by creator
12/10 EXCELLENT post, thank you
This is basically true for every single thing from foods to animals to plants to insects
whites renamed them all and paid no attention to the actual native names the people had before
wikipedia needs to be occupied and completely changed by the JDPON