Why does this even matter. Extra virgin olive oil is way too fucking expensive to deep fry with even if I wanted to smoke out my kitchen and eat olive oil flavored chimichangas. Whole debate is bikeshedding for people with nice kitchens in their suburban homes and nothing else to do except pontificate about how seed oils are going to make you trans. Including Kenji, who in a just world would be court-enjoined from publishing links to EVOO deep frying fume analyses until the price falls below $0.30 per fluid ounce. And I thought I was living like a king, upgrading from canola to soybean.
While I’m at it let me take this moment to further complain about the absolutely piss-poor state of American rental stock kitchens. I have NEVER lived in an apartment that had an actual exhaust venting to building exterior, only those bullshit filters underneath a rangetop microwave. Everything gets coated in gummy dust from the aerosols that are recirculated and you can watch a CO2 meter climb to the maximum reading as the oven warms up. If you want to char anything you need to pull down the smoke detector - god help you in a big apartment building where they’re hardwired and all you can do is poke the button once it’s already started beeping. All of this is academic. Go fry something
You see olive oil frying used for very specific foods, and they make pretty big differences when people actually go for it. I typically fry in peanut or corn oil at home, it’s the cheapest where I live and has the best flavor. However, something like Italian artichoke hearts, or Greek “beneigts” (or whatever they call them) the olive oil is a night and day difference. Idk, it’s a practice more for restaurants than anything. Most people aren’t discerning enough to know when an olive oil fry is worth it, because it is very rare.
Also, Kenji does food science for restaurants. When we’re talking about frying things and don’t care about creating smoke, it’s because we’re in professional kitchens with good ventilation, and are charging people out the ass for a plate so we have to make sure shit is REALLY good so our restaurants don’t become part of the 90 percent. There is nothing wrong with him answering a question, and dunking on the suburban food snobs you don’t like. It’s not that we should be frying things in olive oil, anybody can tell you that’s too expensive to be worth it. It’s about not deligitimizing cooking processes for a reason that isn’t even true. You have any idea how many times some rich fuck I was a private cook for tried to not pay for their food because “you can’t fry in olive oil because it burns the oil” like they weren’t happily using said “burnt” olive oil to eat 2 loaves of bread. It’s about not letting people be armchair experts on subject matters they don’t understand
exactly this - olive oil of any grade is just too expensive to support general deep-frying in full stop, and if the big difference is smoke products making their way into your kitchen, just use veg oil for (most, unless the recipe specifies an oil) deep frying. Even if your fans/filters are good, you’re still dumping a bunch of smoke and polymerized oils into the space between your interior and exterior wall. Congrats, you’ve impregnated your previously fire-resistant gypsum board with flammable oil byproducts and tars for taste, when the end product is 80%+ as good with cheaper, cleaner oil.
Unless it’s especially good fried in olive oil, cook it in the cheap, use refined frying media because everyone wants the tastes/textures of fried food (crispy, fatty, etc), but the upfront costs for deep-frying are always going to be steep against other preparation methods and gain profitability at volume (i.e. french fries, chip shops). You and your turkey-frying, house-fire-starting setup do not a bespoke chippy make, so don’t aspire to be one.
I have operated and maintained commercial deep fryers and my experience is that they fucking suck. They require daily maintenance and the maintenance fucking sucks. The products of commerical fryers fucking suck. Yes. All of them absolutely suck. Even your favorite hole-in-the-wall has a garbage deep fryer that’s held together with love, duct tape and Sysco’s boxed bottle of oil de jour. Deep frying is an absolutely mid cooking technique. Fix Your Hearts Unto Mediocrity or Die.
Deep Frying creates a mid product most of the time, so don’t aspire to excellence. Just aspire to a crispy crust and good browning. Everything else is gravy.
Deep fried turkey is so fucking cursed. The only good thing about it is how flavorful the oil gets for using in other things, but the turkey itself is mid.
However, I’ve never worked at a restaurant that did olive oil frying that had olive oil in their main fryer. It was always a separate midwalled pan with a spider strainer for specific items. Deep fryers just get way too hot for it to ever be viable, separate from price. As far as price goes though, if you’re at home it really isn’t that bad because you can just re-use the olive oil for everything else. Cross contamination is what makes it so expensive for restaurants. The infused fry oil is pretty damn good for pretty much anything you’d use the olive oil for. I don’t personally use it to fry at home, but I’ve done this at a commercial level before at an EXTREMELY weirdly managed restaurant where I was essentially help for a bunch of disgustingly rich people.
Arancini and similar dishes are a night and day difference when done in olive oil. However, I’ve only eaten those on my employer’s dime so also get the satisfaction of eating their food.
oh yeah, I haven’t worked at a place that uses olive oil in a deep fryer either- I just worked at a couple of places with deep fryers and they were a pain in the ass, and most of the time, the stuff that came out of it was fair-to-middling. I know an Italian place that does small fried and baked foods (stromboli, arancini, croquettes etc) that I’m sure does all their frying in OO of some kind and it absolutely fucking slaps; but I’m pretty sure all their stuff is extremely small-batch too considering they usually sell out their food by like 12:30 every day.
Why does this even matter. Extra virgin olive oil is way too fucking expensive to deep fry with even if I wanted to smoke out my kitchen and eat olive oil flavored chimichangas. Whole debate is bikeshedding for people with nice kitchens in their suburban homes and nothing else to do except pontificate about how seed oils are going to make you trans. Including Kenji, who in a just world would be court-enjoined from publishing links to EVOO deep frying fume analyses until the price falls below $0.30 per fluid ounce. And I thought I was living like a king, upgrading from canola to soybean.
While I’m at it let me take this moment to further complain about the absolutely piss-poor state of American rental stock kitchens. I have NEVER lived in an apartment that had an actual exhaust venting to building exterior, only those bullshit filters underneath a rangetop microwave. Everything gets coated in gummy dust from the aerosols that are recirculated and you can watch a CO2 meter climb to the maximum reading as the oven warms up. If you want to char anything you need to pull down the smoke detector - god help you in a big apartment building where they’re hardwired and all you can do is poke the button once it’s already started beeping. All of this is academic. Go fry something
You see olive oil frying used for very specific foods, and they make pretty big differences when people actually go for it. I typically fry in peanut or corn oil at home, it’s the cheapest where I live and has the best flavor. However, something like Italian artichoke hearts, or Greek “beneigts” (or whatever they call them) the olive oil is a night and day difference. Idk, it’s a practice more for restaurants than anything. Most people aren’t discerning enough to know when an olive oil fry is worth it, because it is very rare.
Also, Kenji does food science for restaurants. When we’re talking about frying things and don’t care about creating smoke, it’s because we’re in professional kitchens with good ventilation, and are charging people out the ass for a plate so we have to make sure shit is REALLY good so our restaurants don’t become part of the 90 percent. There is nothing wrong with him answering a question, and dunking on the suburban food snobs you don’t like. It’s not that we should be frying things in olive oil, anybody can tell you that’s too expensive to be worth it. It’s about not deligitimizing cooking processes for a reason that isn’t even true. You have any idea how many times some rich fuck I was a private cook for tried to not pay for their food because “you can’t fry in olive oil because it burns the oil” like they weren’t happily using said “burnt” olive oil to eat 2 loaves of bread. It’s about not letting people be armchair experts on subject matters they don’t understand
exactly this - olive oil of any grade is just too expensive to support general deep-frying in full stop, and if the big difference is smoke products making their way into your kitchen, just use veg oil for (most, unless the recipe specifies an oil) deep frying. Even if your fans/filters are good, you’re still dumping a bunch of smoke and polymerized oils into the space between your interior and exterior wall. Congrats, you’ve impregnated your previously fire-resistant gypsum board with flammable oil byproducts and tars for taste, when the end product is 80%+ as good with cheaper, cleaner oil.
Unless it’s especially good fried in olive oil, cook it in the cheap, use refined frying media because everyone wants the tastes/textures of fried food (crispy, fatty, etc), but the upfront costs for deep-frying are always going to be steep against other preparation methods and gain profitability at volume (i.e. french fries, chip shops). You and your turkey-frying, house-fire-starting setup do not a bespoke chippy make, so don’t aspire to be one.
I have operated and maintained commercial deep fryers and my experience is that they fucking suck. They require daily maintenance and the maintenance fucking sucks. The products of commerical fryers fucking suck. Yes. All of them absolutely suck. Even your favorite hole-in-the-wall has a garbage deep fryer that’s held together with love, duct tape and Sysco’s boxed bottle of oil de jour. Deep frying is an absolutely mid cooking technique. Fix Your Hearts Unto Mediocrity or Die.
Deep Frying creates a mid product most of the time, so don’t aspire to excellence. Just aspire to a crispy crust and good browning. Everything else is gravy.
Deep fried turkey is so fucking cursed. The only good thing about it is how flavorful the oil gets for using in other things, but the turkey itself is mid.
However, I’ve never worked at a restaurant that did olive oil frying that had olive oil in their main fryer. It was always a separate midwalled pan with a spider strainer for specific items. Deep fryers just get way too hot for it to ever be viable, separate from price. As far as price goes though, if you’re at home it really isn’t that bad because you can just re-use the olive oil for everything else. Cross contamination is what makes it so expensive for restaurants. The infused fry oil is pretty damn good for pretty much anything you’d use the olive oil for. I don’t personally use it to fry at home, but I’ve done this at a commercial level before at an EXTREMELY weirdly managed restaurant where I was essentially help for a bunch of disgustingly rich people.
Arancini and similar dishes are a night and day difference when done in olive oil. However, I’ve only eaten those on my employer’s dime so also get the satisfaction of eating their food.
oh yeah, I haven’t worked at a place that uses olive oil in a deep fryer either- I just worked at a couple of places with deep fryers and they were a pain in the ass, and most of the time, the stuff that came out of it was fair-to-middling. I know an Italian place that does small fried and baked foods (stromboli, arancini, croquettes etc) that I’m sure does all their frying in OO of some kind and it absolutely fucking slaps; but I’m pretty sure all their stuff is extremely small-batch too considering they usually sell out their food by like 12:30 every day.