What Kind Of Oil Should I Use?

Broadly speaking, oils can fall into two categories: neutral oil and not.

A neutral oil is one that has very little flavour and therefore will not impact the final flavour of your dish. Neutral oils are often called for in baked goods, when deep frying, or during sautéing. They have a high smoke point, meaning they don’t burn at high temperatures and threaten to ruin your dish.

When choosing a neutral oil, you have many choices. Vegetable oil, canola oil, rapeseed oil, or sunflower oil are some of the most popular options. They can all be used to deep fried chicken or to make muffins because they all have a pretty high smoke point, ranging from 216 to 230 degrees C.

Refined or unrefined?

Oils that bear the label of "refined" have undergone additional processing, such as heating or deodorising, following extraction. Unrefined oils, on the other hand, remain unchanged and taste more like the plant from which they were made. We advise using an already mild tasting choice and getting a refined version if you're looking for the most neutral oil possible.

What is best for cooking:

Firstly, think about how you’re cooking something. What temperature is it going to? If you are roasting or deep frying, you need something with a high smoke point that tends to be a neutral oil as mentioned above. If you are making something that has a dominant flavour elsewhere, such as a curry, using a neutral oil also makes sense here too. Neutral oil tends to be cheaper than stronger flavoured oils such as olive oils so if you aren’t going to taste it, it makes sense to use the neutral oil.

If you are making something where the flavour of the oil adds to the dish, then it makes sense to use it there. For example, if making spaghetti aglio e olio, the olive oil is a dominant flavour of the recipe so using the best quality extra virgin olive oil you can is important. If you were making a banana bread with desiccated coconut, it would make sense to use coconut oil as your fat in the batter as these flavours make sense.

Moreover, thinking about how you cook it, sautéing is a good example of where to use a flavoured oil, whether a garlic oil or a chilli oil, since sautéing doesn’t involve much browning. This means that the oil wont burn but also means that less flavour comes from the char of the pan so using a flavoured oil isn’t wasted here.