Your choice of cooking fat page

[maba]

I'd like to know what your choice of cooking fat is? I've always used olive oil but I read it's best consumed cold. This morning for the first time I used only butter as the cooking medium. I found it very hard to use as much as I did (thanks to CW), but I took a deep breath and did it anyway Oh, and the food tasted great. How about coconut oil for cooking?

[madMUHHH]

Hands down, coconut oil may be a bit more expensive, but it's pretty much the best cooking oil you can get.

I pretty much only use coconut oil and butter, olive oil only on rare occasions.

Lard is supposed to be very, very good, but I haven't tried that one yet.

[Nick]

Avocado oil has the same poly/mono/sat breakdown as olive oil, but it's got a much higher smoke point and fewer fragile things in it to get damaged. I use it when I want something that is liquid immediately.

I also have coconut oil. I use butter sometimes, but I try to ease up on the dairy. I also have ghee (mostly for Indian food).


For breakfast, my standard protocol is to cook 4-5 strips of bacon fairly slowly, until they're browned but still pliable, and a lot of the bacon grease has rendered out, and then I cook the eggs in that. It's not quite as delicious as eggs made with butter, but wasting bacon grease is a sin.

[rnikoley]

Coconut oil, lard, bacon drippings (bacon flavored lard), ghee (clarified butter), unsalted butter, and duck fat.


I'll use a little toasted sesame oil right at the very end of a stir fry, for flavor.


I almost never cook with olive oil, but use it on salads all the time (usually with some comb of lemon or lime, dijon mustard, balsamic, or apple cider vinegar).


Good lard (leaf lard) is pure white and has no pork flavor at all. Rendered duck fat is amazingly delicious.


The one I've not yet tried is tallow.

[maba]

Thank you all so much! I'm thrilled to know Coconut oil is good for cooking. My parents in India have access to plenty of coconuts and can have fresh oil made from "oil mills". I'm trying to get them to adopt the primal lifestyle.


Darn, the more I read here, the more I realize this is how my grandmother used to cook and eat (only exception being grains) until we started subscribing to the new fangled dietary recommendations. May be I should start a Primal Indian recipe section. Any Indian food fans here?

[SerialSinner]

I just had a big piece of chicken deep fried in the lard I rendered a couple of days ago (I have a lot of it, so deep frying is going to be a hobby of mine for the next month or so).


The chicken was extremely tasty. No trace of pork taste or smell, very crispy. No smoke. Simply delicious.

[Nick]

Some Indian food is pretty easy to make primal. Curry with similar modifications to Thai curries: just lose the potatoes, if any. Carrots, onions, other veggies okay. You can use yogurt in an Indian curry, but coconut milk can work too. I usually end up doing Thai curries. It's a delicious way to get a bunch of coconut fat into your system.

Also, Chicken Tikka Saag. The way I make it, it's basically just chicken, spinach, and ghee as the bulk ingredients, and garlic, ginger, and dry spices as well. It's low carb as long as you're okay with a huge amount of spinach. If I eat a lot I might down 10oz of spinach, which is just 10g carbs, 6g fiber, 1g sugar. I make my own ghee so I'm not shy about adding a lot to get the right taste/texture.

[maranne]

I use coconut oil and duck fat for cooking. It is exquisite!


Olive oil goes in my salads and a bit of balsamic vinegar.

M x

[Miriam]

Maba, bring it on, I would love some primal Indian recipes, one of my girlfriends who is currently out of the country is Indian and I love inviting myself over for dinner as her family eats lots of meat, meat and more meat (and a bit of dhal on the side).


I use coconut oil for chicken and butter for steak/lamb, though the steak I buy is Wagyu so has marbling through it so doesn’t need too much but a good pat of butter once cooked never goes astray.

[Tarlach]

We just use lard for everything...