The Wheeling Gourmet by Nicolas Steenhout

4 February 2009

Use half vegetable oil and half butter (not margarine) when you panfry foods on high heat in a pan.

The butter will give some taste while the oil will prevent the butter from burning.

Don't use olive oil! The taste of the oil and the butter are likely to compete. Also olive oil burns at too low a temperature.

Butter's smoke point at 140°C. To panfry effectively you need higher heat than that. So using a taste-neutral oil with a much higher smoke point is better. I like using refined canola oil (smoke point: 240°C) or refined soybean oil (smoke point: 232°C)

More information on oils smoke points from Wikipedia.

Tags: Butter, Margarine, Oil, Olive Oil, Smoke Point
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 14:32 and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.