
Smoke point of cooking oils - bookofjoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cooking_oils
======
simonebrunozzi
It really matters HOW an oil is produced.

"Good" olive oil enjoys a really healthy process, as opposed to most "new"
oils available commercially only in recent years.

However, there is a lot of "fake" or altered olive oil in circulation. Be well
aware of this. [0] [1]

[0]:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the-
olive-oil-scam-if-80-is-fake-why-do-you-keep-buying-it/#1e627804639d)

[1]: [https://www.amazon.com/Extra-Virginity-Sublime-Scandalous-
Wo...](https://www.amazon.com/Extra-Virginity-Sublime-Scandalous-
World/dp/0393343618)

------
nesadi
I've never understood what I'm supposed to do with this information. My stove
gives me heat information in low to very high or in numbers from 1 to 6. How
does that translate into a temperature? I have no idea how hot my frying pan
ever is in Celsius.

Edit: no idea what I'm being downvoted for, okay

~~~
sn9
In addition to just using a thermometer, many recipes tell you to heat the oil
until it starts smoking. So now you know roughly what temperature that is
based on the oil used.

If you need to find a substitute for a cooking oil, smoke point is probably
the most important factor with which you compare oils, followed by neutrality
of flavor.

------
ajflores1604
I recently switched to using safflower oil for most things. It's completely
changed how my steaks come out on the grill. Previously I've used peanut,
corn, olive, avocado, canola, and vegetable. And so far safflower has given me
the cleanest flavor. Also works great for simple stuff like scrambled eggs. I
still use olive oil a lot for the flavor it gives for things like roasting
vegetables in the oven. But safflower is my knew favorite

~~~
wolco
You didn't mention Coconut oil the best tasting oil.

~~~
jacobush
OMG can't stand it.

~~~
joshschreuder
Go refined then, has basically no flavour but a healthy oil with a high smoke
point.

~~~
beckler
gotta be careful if you use refined coconut oil, some of them contain
partially-hydrogenated fats which are rather unhealthy.

~~~
joshschreuder
Good call, wasn't aware of that so I'll keep an eye out.

------
jacobkg
I once left a cast iron skillet on the stove about 1/2 full of canola oil for
about 10 minutes on high heat. I was heating it up to deep fry something
(don’t do this) and got distracted. I started picking up the pan to move it to
another burner when the oil burst into flame.

Everything turned out okay in the end but the fire department got called out
(building smoke detector went off) and I had to repaint the kitchen.

All that to say smoke point is serious business

~~~
proverbialbunny
This is why you always want to know where your salt is, and your fire
extinguisher too.

I had a room mate do the same thing once. The flame must have been at least
4-5ft tall, hitting the ceiling. She grabbed a box of salt and started pouring
it on the oil. This killed the fire rather quickly, before even a smoke
detector went off or it created any damage.

~~~
nitrogen
Would salt work better than baking soda?

~~~
abcd_f
Whatever cools off the oil the quickest will work the best.

~~~
magicalhippo
And isn't water.

~~~
sildur
I once tried to put away an oil fire with water, and I can attest it is not a
good idea. The flames were impressive, though.

------
killjoywashere
I have a teflon pan with which I can use butter in to make omelettes and I
have a stainless pan that I generally use lard (bacon drippings) because the
omelette will stick if I use butter. I am obviously vegawarian at best.

What do vegetarians use for omelette in a steel pan?

~~~
nanomonkey
Vegetarians use butter, but if you're smart you use a well seasoned high
carbon steel pan, or cast iron.

The best seasoning for a pan is done with flaxseed oil, as far as I
understand, as it has a low smoke point so the oil will polymerize and turn
into a glassy surface.

~~~
atombender
The flaxseed thing comes from a 2010 blog article [1], which purports to be a
scientific approach to seasoning pans. As people have found out, it's
unfortunately not a good idea.

Aside from the fact that flaxseed is ridiculously expensive compared to the
traditional alternatives, it creates a brittle surface and flakes off after a
while. It also requires a ridiculous number of coatings to get to the right
level of smoothness. It's just not worth it compared to something cheap like
canola or soy.

A lot of people have looked into it. Here [2] is a good Reddit post from
/r/castiron.

But among all of the technical discussions about seasoning it's easy to forget
that a pan generally only needs to be seasoned once, and most pans you can buy
are well pre-seasoned, and using the pan for cooking is also a form of
seasoning.

[1] [http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-
te...](http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-
for-seasoning-cast-iron/)

[2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/5owtnm/why_i_dont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/5owtnm/why_i_dont_recommend_flax_seed_oil/)

~~~
alexhutcheson
In my experience, you’ll eventually cook something in the cast iron that
sticks really hard, and the only easy ways to get the burnt-on gunk out end up
stripping the seasoning, so re-seasoning ends up being a roughly semiannual
process in my house. Would love to know how to avoid this.

~~~
Moru
I usually heat up the pan directly after cooking and wash it under the hot
water. Just heat enough so it makes a bit of steam when it hits the water,
scrub with a wooden spatula.

Or while cooking, add water if it fits whatever you cook. Make a sauce out of
what is left after the sunday steak is out of the pan.

------
mijoharas
For people wondering _what_ the smoke point is here is the full wiki page
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point)

~~~
i_cant_speel
The article fails to mention why the smoke point matters. Is it something you
want to avoid?

~~~
jimbob45
It's the point at which the oil burns. Thus, if you need to cook higher than
that temperature, you're gonna end up with burnt oil.

------
iambateman
I’ve always heard that canola has a much higher smoke point than olive, but
the page suggests they’re near the same (depending on the olive oil).

Thoughts?

~~~
zhabsksbs
Why bother w/ olive oil if it isn’t extra virgin?

~~~
Lazare
Olive oil is healthy, good to cook with, and not too strongly flavoured.
Depending on where you are, it's also generally fairly cheap. As a general
purpose cooking oil, it's a solid choice, and EVOO is _not_ a particularly
good replacement.

It's like asking why you'd want a screwdriver when you already have a really
nice hammer; they're different tools for different purposes.

~~~
Zardoz84
Here, in Spain, it's cheap. We nearly only use olive oil, and sometimes
sunflower oil. It's really hard to find any other kind of oil.

------
ncmncm
My takeaway is, wow, avocado oil is hardy stuff!

~~~
reilly3000
It’s become our main cooking oil. In addition to its high smoke point, it is a
more neutral flavor when compared with olive oil.

~~~
RandomTisk
I couldn't find Costco's usual non-stick spray 2 pack, so I got their Avocado
spray instead. It has virtually no non-stick qualities from what I could tell.

~~~
dboreham
Cooking spray is just oil in a spray can, usually Canola.

~~~
dragonwriter
Cooking spray is _not_ just oil in a spray can, because additives are
necessary for it to work well in a spray can.

------
alpb
Hmm they usually recommend flaxseed oil for seasoning cast iron skillets. It
seems like its smoking point is very low, and recommended seasoning temp is
around 400-500'F. Wouldn't something like avocado oil be better?

~~~
chongli
If you don't heat the oil above its smoke point then nothing will happen to
the oil, chemically. This is not what you want when seasoning cookware. The
purpose of heating the oil and cookware is to induce polymerization so that
the oil becomes bonded to the surface.

As far as I know, this blog post [1] is the originator for the recommendation
to use flaxseed oil specifically for seasoning cast iron. I am not a chemist,
so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information.

[1] [http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-
te...](http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-
for-seasoning-cast-iron/)

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I've seen a number of other cooks disavow flaxseed oil after that blog post's
rise in popularity. They say, anecdotally, that flaxseed oil flakes off more
easily than regular vegetable oil seasoning.

~~~
chongli
That may be due to using a flaxseed oil with impurities or not using high
enough temperature during the seasoning process. Cook's Illustrated [1] put
the flaxseed method to the test and found it superior to vegetable oil.

[1] [https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5820-the-
ultimate-w...](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5820-the-ultimate-way-
to-season-cast-iron)

~~~
pfranz
I wish they tested different oils. I didn't see flax on the wikipedia page,
but another page says 225° F [1]. This page [2] mentions flax seed oil flaking
off and recommends refined grapeseed oil (which looks to have a smoke point of
400° F).

Usually, I see flaxseed oil in the refrigerated section. I don't have any
experience with it, but perhaps the fickleness of storing it causes flaking in
practice? Either way, it sounds like there are better alternatives to those
two.

[1] [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-
fitness/heal...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-
fitness/health/smoke-point-matters-in-cooking-with-oil/article26569060/)

[2] [https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-
pan-s...](https://fieldcompany.com/pages/how-to-season-cast-iron-pan-skillet-
instructions)

------
zaarn
I've found a good way to handle the smoke point is to heat butter and mix it
with a cooking oil with a higher smoke point; in my experience this raises the
smoke point of the butter a lot without giving up the taste.

~~~
mikequinlan
Not true. [https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/09/does-mixing-oil-and-
butt...](https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/09/does-mixing-oil-and-butter-
really-alter-the-smoke-point.html)

~~~
ceejayoz
Thank you for posting this!

The "butter plus oil has a higher smoke point" theory is like building a house
that's half tungsten and half wood and claiming it can't catch fire.

~~~
bentpins
Maybe if you had the wood half be encased in a tungsten shell?

------
lota-putty
Our family* moved from Peanut & Sunflower oils to Rice-Bran, Mustard & Palm
oils a decade ago.

Rice-Bran : cooking

Palm : frying

Mustard : taste toppings

* lower middle-class Indian

~~~
guelo
You should not use Palm oil since it is destroying rainforests.

------
mastrsushi
I wish Wikipedia would allow sorting tables by column. I know Confluence has
that.

~~~
tricolon
It does. Are you by chance looking at the mobile version?

~~~
mastrsushi
Yes

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parliament32
tl;dr: Use avocado oil. It's fairly cheap (Costco), mostly tasteless, and good
for pretty much everything.

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egdod
There are an awful lot of random Wikipedia articles being posted lately. Some
of them are interesting and on topic, but this one? Come on.

~~~
war1025
If you do cooking at home, this is a pretty interesting topic to learn about,
I think.

~~~
egdod
Fine, but... it’s just a table of numbers. There’s nothing interesting or
thought-provoking about it.

~~~
3131s
Numbers that represent things, things which have important implications for
human health.

This relates to nutrition, chemistry, industrial processing and more, so I'm
not surprised to see it here. I found this article independently many times
before today because these topics are interesting to me, and I always enjoy
obscure and data-oriented Wikipedia articles.

------
tempsy
Would suspect a very common mistake a lot of people make is using extra virgin
olive oil to cook with at a medium or high temperature. Don't do it.

I've found ghee (clarified butter) to the best thing I've found for anything
requiring medium or higher cooking temperatures.

~~~
asciident
I used to worry about that but it turns out that cooking (even flying) with
extra virgin olive oil is totally fine. The problem with the low smoke point
in evoo is a myth.

[https://www.aboutoliveoil.org/olive-oil-smoke-point-
measured](https://www.aboutoliveoil.org/olive-oil-smoke-point-measured)

~~~
latch
This is doesn't pass the burnt smell test. First of all, anyone's who's done
even a little bit of cooking will notice that extra virgin olive oil smokes /
burns very quickly.

Secondly, this article claims "the oil and the food did not exceed 180⁰ F"
which is well below the point where Maillard reaction occurs. Maybe in their
specific "we represent the olive oil industry" environment, it didn't exceed
this temperature, but I'd take that with a grain of salt.

~~~
Zardoz84
I always cook with virgin oil and NEVER I get it to burn. Even putting the
fire to max.

------
mistrial9
"heat the food, not the oil".. A Smoke Point is not the issue, it is well
before that, when heat breaks long bonds in the whole oil into shorter, less
digestable and less nutritious forms... quality oils are a secret to long life
! conversely, low-quality and "broken" oils will wear and pollute the body
over time.. personally, I use water during cooking for many whole foods, and
add oil at later cooking stages (which takes practice, and is not a universal
recommendation)..

~~~
SEJeff
The Mailard reaction is the scientific description of browning food. It
happens with amino acids (in virtually every oil) and sugar combined with
heat. Going above roughly 180C / 355F results in a different chemical reaction
known as pyrolysis aka burning.

