benjamin163

Thanks so much for this reply and apologies for the further questions it unlocks! If baking powder is double acting (ie it reacts with its own acid AND it reacts with heat, then why use bicarb at all? What is the benefit of bicarb? Is it that you can use far les of it to get a rise (as long as there is acid in the recipe) and therefore it won't impair the taste of your bake? I'm thinking it's so difficult to be sure EXACTLY how much acid is in a dish that adding a little baking powder is a good way of making sure you will get a rise. But given you need to use roughly 4x as much of the stuff as bicarb, it's good to use bicarb where possible so that you aren't tainting the taste. Is that the long and short of it?

Hello, I understand baking powder contains the correct amount of acid (cream of tartare) needed to react with the bicarb to get a chemical reaction and a rise. I get that this makes it ideal raising agent when there is no acid in a recipe for bicarbonate alone to react with. But isn’t it the case that almost all recipes can be adapted to have some sort of acid in them, perhaps in the form of brown sugar, lemon juice, buttermilk? Why use baking powder if you can put acid in most baking recipes without spoiling them? Is it simply an unnecessary added extrea in those circumstances? Or is it a safety net that some bakers like to fall back on in case for whatever reason, the bicarb chemical reaction doesn't work? Or is there yet another reason for adding baking powder? The next question. How much acid is actually needed for the bicarbonate to do its job of creating air but also how do I ensure there is no bicarb left after all the acid is used which might spoil the taste. If the answer is a ratio of 4 parts acid to five parts bicarbonate as I have read, how do you measure that in different acidic ingredients like brown sugar or buttermilk? How do I know how much acid is present in each of these ingredients in order to use the correct amount of bicarbonate? Any help gratefully received.

Thanks so much for your reply. My scant investigations have uncovered the same oil as an alternative. Have you ever cooked with it? Does it have a pronounced taste? Is it prohibitively expensive? I shall investigate. But I would say your approach of not doing much deep fat frying at all is the way forward, depressing as that sounds 😂 I don't do an awful lot myself but when I do I love it and I would love to know how I can do it in the most natural way possible. I shall try avacado oil and report back.

Thank you for the suggestions. Both are amazing for taste and performance but I am wondering if there is a non saturated fat which might work nearly as well. On a side note, it seems that in the 'olden days' before we refined our oils on an industrial scale, beef fat is what all our fish and chips were cooked in. Can you imagine how delicious those fish and chips must have been? The stuff used now doesn't resemble oil as we know it in any way apparently.

Ooh you're so right. I love cooking with ghee. But I was wondering if there was a non saturated fat that could do the job as well as ghee can.

here's what I've garnered... Cooking fats come in two basic forms. Saturated fats and non saturated fats. Saturated fats are solid at room temp and are mostly animal fats eg butter, beef dripping, lard etc. Unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature and are mostly from 'vegetable' matter (olives, corn, palm etc) or seeds such as sunflower. These unsaturated fats have some health benefits. They help drive down cholestorol. But to make them workable in a kitchen for frying they need to go through a process which involves filtering, bleaching and deodourizing. If you want to use these oils again and again at high temperatures - for instance if you are cooking in a fast food restaurant - the processes the oil goes through are more and more astringent. There are unsaturated fats available on the market that haven't been through this process because the ingredients which make them have been processed without extracting the oils from the seeds or vegetables using heat and chemicals. This is called cold filtering and the benefits are clear inasmuch as many nutrients remain in the oil and it doesn't have these nasties in it. However, because they haven't been through this refinement, they usually have a much lower smoking point so aren't suitable for heavy duty frying. So whilst these cold pressed oils (or 'virgin' or 'extra virgin' as they are often referred to) are brilliant for adding to salads or even indeed for rubbing onto skin (!), they become rancid when heated to temperatures that work for knocking up some onion bhajis or doing a bit of southern fried chicken. In fact from what I gather, the overheating of these oils again and again changes the molecular structure in such a way that all the perceived benefits of using an unsaturated fat disappear (I need to do some more digging here). So I wondered if there was an unrefined non saturated fat that could be heated and still retain all the perceived health benefits. Now then. It seems that, despite popular wisdom, unrefined olive oil can be heated to roughly 200c without smoking. This is pretty good for frying so I wonder why so many people say NEVER to fry with extra virgin olive oil. However, the taste is obviously extremely pronounced. This is in contrast to, say, a sunflower oil which has a neutral taste and is therefore better for frying things like a southern fried chicken breast or something. But whilst a refined sunflower oil can be heated to 250c happily, an unrefined one goes wrong past 107c. No good. So my question was, has anyone successfully used an unrefined oil (ie one that hasn't had tons of chemicals used in the extraction) to fry their food successfully. It seems avacoado oil can be heated unrefined to high temperatures. I havn't come across it though. Also palm oil. I have never used that either. Unrefined palm oil looks extremely red and it sounds like it has all sorts of gunk in it when it hasn't gone through the refinement process which I wonder if it makes unsuitable for cooking. The upshot of all this is I feel like the real health solution to the problem is not to eat deep fried food! But if, like me, you hanker after it every now and again, this is an unsatisfactory resolution. That's why I've started digging and put the question out there. I must say though that the little I have garnered is really worrying, especially if you are someone who likes fast food or processed food on an industrial scale. It seems like the oils used in these restaurants and factories might well be really awfully bad for us. I know that it's not exactly rocket science that too much fried food is bad for you. But the oils used on an industrial scale in particular almost don't seem like oil at all and it's amazign we don't know more about them given they are so prevalent in many people's diets. A lot of what I'm learning has come from a brilliant book called 'Swallow This - serving up the fast food industry's darkest secrets'. The whole book is brilliantly written and there is a whole section on oil which much of the above has come from. I have been in touch with Frymax to ask them some of these questions but have received no reply from them even though I went through the correct channels and was told someone would get back to me. Anyway, I just want to enjoy my lovely fried food at home on a non industrial level and wondered if anyone has cracked the oil problem or if we just have to accept that refinement with all its nasty sounding side effects is the best way. On a side note it does amaze me that something perceived as so natural like oil for cooking goes through such an extreme process without us being any the wiser. Look at a bottle of veg oil, read the label. Absolutely no information about the process and the chemicals involved. It seems like refined oil is nowhere near as benign as it looks or sounds.

Hello all, I was doing some very top line research into cooking oils but it's opened up rather a large can of worms so I thought I'd put the question out there. Are there any unrefined oils out there that can cope with deep frying? I understand the need for an oil with a high smoke point and I understand that refined oils are the most stable when heated past 170 ad above. But given that refinement seems such an awful process (bleaching, deodourising etc) I wondered if anyone had found an unrefined oil that could hold up to the task. eg unrefined palm oil seems like it's a robust alternative but I don't know if the taste or colour affects the food too much. Any thoughts gratefully received.

Such great advice thank you for taking the time, I shall get onto facebook for sure.

Thank you for your thoughts. Here is the recipe I used... Boil up the following for the stock... 250ml white wine 250ml water 250ml white wine vinegar assorted dried spices Simmer seafood (mussels, clams, squid, baby octopus, prawns) in the stock for 15 mins. Transfer the seafood to sterilized jars, well drained. Add oil heated to 60 degrees to the jars, covering the seafood and secure the jars. The recipe comes from a book called Preserving by Oded Schwartz. I must say I find the techniques throughout the book a little random and not fully explained. However this is the recipe published and what I used. I guess the only difference is I doubled the vinegar stock because I used far more seafood. Maybe I didn't use enough stock. Could that be an issue? I have taken a pic of the recipe and attached also. All thoughts gratefully received.

I recently made a mixed seafood in oil dish. I followed the recipe very closely except for one point. The recipe required me to heat oil up to 60 degrees C before pouring it into the kilner jar filled with the seafood. I guessed this temperature because my thermometer wasn't working. Unfortunately when I went to check on the kilner jars after a month, the stench was disgusting. I'm wondering if it was the non precise measuring of the temperature of the oil that did for it and what the science behind this is. I would say the oil I heated was definitely hotter than 60 but I thought hotter was better as my understanding is that the heated oil is there to create a vacuum in the kilner jar once cooled. I also noted that a couple of prawns had protruded the surface of the oil and wondered if this was the problem, although all the shellfish was boiled in vinegar beforehand and I was strict on sterilization. Any thoughts on this are gratefully received. I was gutted to have to throw it all away as I made loads and I spent a big wedge on the ingredients. Also, any tips on making sure none of the ingredients protrude from the surface of the oil would be most welcomed. Thank you.

Great story. Yes I substituted butter for oil for exactly the same reason. Carrot cake is a great example. Same with your banana bread. I dunno, these just didn't rise properly. I wonder if it's because I only creamed half the butter with sugar and that's somehow not worked.

Totally. Me being greedy!

I just made muffins but instead of creaming 110g butter I creamed 70g and then added vegetable oil in a bid to try and give them that moistness I crave. Whilst they came out delicious, they did spread more than they rose. I wonder if that's because of my meddling with oil. The rest of the recipe remained the same. Baking powder and Bicarb were used. The only other thing that was different is that I pushed the blueberries in on top after spooning the batter into each case in order that they didn't sink - which they didn't. I guess another thing was that I mixed the dry ingredients with the wet only a tiny bit, just until it was incorporated and no more. Which of these things contributed to them spreading a bit rather than fully rising? Any help gratefully received .

Well I tried exactly the same recipe for cupcakes but creamed the butter and sugar first. The difference was that the creamed version formed mountainous peaks on my cupcakes which I of course lopped off and ate! So I'm thinking the batch I creamed rose even more than the first batch - which rose nicely nonetheless. In this case I think it's whether you can be bothered to cream. I got a bit more rise but the all in one recipe was also delicious and light. Lot's of good science I've been put onto in the thread and I'm ploughing through it although scientist I am not!

This is a great article thank you for posting it.