Cooking Oil is fat. Either the fat of plants (peanut oil, canola oil, olive oil, etc), or the fat of animals (bacon grease, beef tallow, etc). Humans evolved in a state of near starvation and so seek out energy dense foods like sugars and fats. As such we cook with them because we are geared to want to consume them. It also gets hotter than water does which does unique things to food, making it crisp and is something we like.
Oil is a fat.
Fats are one of 4 pillars of cooking (other 3 being salt, acid, and heat)
Fats have many effects.
As a main ingredient it carries rich flavor and texture.
As a cooking medium (which oil is) it can be heated to a higher temperature and let foods develop a good texture by browning and having a crisp crust.
This browning not only affects texture but it introduces new flavor to a dish.
Lastly fats are also important because they coat the tongue and let the flavor to stay with your taste buds longer which lets you savor flavors longer.
Besides what others said, oil is kind of like liquid thermal paste. It distributes heat evenly to the surface being cooked. Try browning broccoli wothout oil. The parts in contact with the pan will brown, but the parts not touching it will be uncooked.
Drop some oil in there, and the heat gets distributed evenly, and you start to brown it more evenly.
Adam ragusea has a good video on oil if I’m not being too clear.
>What is oil
Oil is fat. That’s all. Be it fat from seeds, nuts, or animals, it’s all fat.
>why do we cook with it
Fat is very good at 3 things
– Sticking to things
– Transferring heat into things
– Tasting good
The first & second parts are particularly useful with cooking. Try to cook a brussel sprout without oil on an open pan. It will not cook evenly; it’ll burn.
Air doesn’t transfer heat well. That means the only part of the food getting heated is the surface directly touching the pan. If it ain’t flat hugging that pan, it ain’t cooking, and the stuff that is hugging the pan might not be cooking evenly all over
When you coat food in even just a little film of oil, that oil coats the food, sticks to it, and spreads the heat out evenly across it.
>why do things taste so much better with it?
Fat is very calorie dense; It’s why we store energy as fat in our bodies.
Your body likes sugar because it’s basically instant energy; You eat it, it burns like tissue paper into energy ready to be used. That’s good for survival
With fat, it’s actually pretty difficult to breakdown. But, it breaks down into a lot of energy. Sugar is good because it’s immediate satisfaction, fat is good because it holds 2× the energy as sugar; It’s just on a slow release.
On top of that, your body needs many fats to function. Many fatty acids have jobs in your body on their own. Omega-3 and Omega-6 are the well known ones.
A lot of vitamins can also only dissolve in fat. Vitamins A, D, E, and K for example can’t dissolve in water. You have to dissolve it to move it around the body, so fats are needed. This is actually why it can be healthy to drizzle a little raw olive oil into a soup; Helps absorb things.
An oil is essentially a long string (or series of connected strings) of carbon and hydrogen. They are poly-mers where each “mer” is a carbon link in a chain of carbons. They are extremely energy dense, and our body is capable of extracting energy from a couple varieties of them. Our body is not capable of digesting some others, (like the ones you find in the ground). Most plants and animals also use fat as a sort of energy storage chemical.
Anyway, our taste buds like the ones that we are capable of eating, because they are a nice extremely rich source of calories. More than that, most plants and animals store useful things in fats: micronutrients like vitamin A D and K are all primarily found in fats. So generally they’re a nice find. So we, generally speaking, evolved to really like how they taste so that we’d have a desire to eat them. Us cooking with it these days is mostly an exploit, of sorts, of our evolutionary urges.
Also fat just happens to be a really convenient way to transfer heat more gently and evenly to food so that it all cooks evenly (less wasted food because the surface doesn’t burn, and the interior gets more cooked and safer to eat). This is a nice added bonus more than anything, and kindof a coincidence. This also adds more fat to food, which our tastebuds happen to already like a lot.
Another added bonus is that oil is really useful for producing the texture of certain baked and fried goods, generally keeping thinga soft enough for our relatively fragile teeth from wearing down.
Bottom line, oil is good stuff that we had a lot of evolutionary and historical reasons to like
Two reasons: heat convection and flavour dissemination.
Oil acts like an interface between the hot surface of the pan/pot and the food you’re cooking. It basically fills in the little gaps of the food and the cooking surface. It’s also essential for the Mailliard reaction, which is carmelization of any starches, carbohydrates, and sugars the food contains, which gives us all those “flavour molecules” as I like to call them.
For flavour, a lot of volatile molecules which are responsible for the flavours we like are fat/oil soluble, so oil will readily take up the flavour and odour of just about any volatile molecule.
This is why you’re advised to keep your butter separate from anything like garlic, coffee, or any other strong-tasting or -smelling thing (ice cream, too…..mmm…french vanilla and garlic).
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