This is so true. It used to be that “real” men, “manly” men, ate their steak well done. John Wayne was a great example of this. Only savages ate “bloody” meat. Now, somehow, we have reached the societal opposite, where sophisticates soft-brag that they like it “black and blue.” And the toxic males all say “Just slap it hard and put it on the plate.”
I’ve no idea what drives these changes, but it would make for interesting research.
I recently had to explain to a couple of the homies that if the recipe says “vegetable oil” extra-light olive oil (which I buy in CostCo volumes and use for everything) will, in fact, work. Why anyone would think it isn’t vegetable oil I have no idea.
Same here! I don’t mind if the steak has pink in the middle, but only pink. If it’s bleeding, I’m not a happy camper. I’d horrify a chef at a fancy steak restaurant.
And moist poultry always weirds me out, too. I keep thinking it’s undercooked. Since learning to brine the thanksgiving turkey, I’ve finally found a way to have moist turkey that I know is fully (overe)cooked.
Well, if you want to be pedantic, olive oil doesn’t come from a vegetable (it’s a fruit). Corn oil comes from a grain. Soy oil comes from a legume as does peanut oil. Canola oil would qualify as vegetable in nature, since rapeseed is a brassica 
. That’s the only true “vegetable” oil I can think of offhand.
But yeah, basically oil is oil. It may affect the flavor of what you cook, and depending on the usage, the different burning points may come into play. But if I’m making a cake that calls for a third of a cup of oil, it’s gonna be soy, canola, olive… whatever we have on hand.
There is definitely a town called Weed!
We stopped at a rest stop there, 2 years ago, on a trip south from Oregon (where there were weed dispensaries on every corner). This amused us. We also drove through SNOW to get there. In May.
I just use Extra Virgin for most things. It imparts some of that olive oil flavour to the food, but in most contexts, I find that enjoyable - it can even be interesting for cooking sweet things like pancakes.
As far as I understand it, the arguments against using olive oil break down to:
It has a strong flavour - which can be true, but if you like that flavour, that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s not really that strong usually (there is a spectrum of flavour even with genuine EVOO.)
It has a flavour that is not appropriate for cuisine from [x region] - totally get that for authentic food cooked within that region, or any attempt to cook something fully-authentically-x anywhere else, but otherwise, when food crosses borders, all bets are off. Cuisine is not a fully-solved problem and you’re allowed to mix and match, make changes to suit your local palate or the local availability of ingredients, etc.
It breaks down at a low temperature and becomes carcinogenic - this is simply false (albeit very widely repeated). People conflate ‘smoke point’ with breakdown of long chain fatty acids; they are not the same phenomenon - olive oil is one of the most resistant oils to this kind of breakdown (the smoke point is indeed low, but that’s not related).
Cooking makes it taste horrible - Maybe. Can’t say I have noticed this problem.
It’s too expensive to use for frying - I mean, maybe, but unless you’re a person who is standing there wailing ‘I like to fry with olive oil! Also, I don’t understand where all my money has gone!’, then this is a nonexistent problem.
‘Vegetable’ in vegetable oil doesn’t mean that; it’s vegetable as opposed to animal or mineral (or synthetic, I guess). Besides, all of the things you listed are members of the vegetable kingdom, so olive, corn, soy, peanut, olive are all vegetable oils.
Hehehe…
Extra virgin oils are the only ones I have around as I use olive oil for flavor and sunflower for general use. That’s pretty much my oil dichotomy. I typically have Frantoia ($30/L) and California Olive Ranch 100% (same price) around. And then Ukrainian sunflower oil at $4-$5/L. The olive oil definitely imparts flavors. I’ll use it for sauteeing veggies, making tomato sauce, pouring it on bread of pizza, that sort of thing. I once tried making mayo with 100% evoo and good god was that something I could not stomach. But, yeah, it is good for a lot of things and its flavor is the point of using it. Whether that flavor works with what you’re cooking is up to you.
This is exactly what I do. A large jug of Costo olive oil lives on my counter, just far enough away from the stove to keep it from being exposed to heat when I turn the stove or oven on. I rarely even use butter, just occasionally ghee in Indian food.
On a recent visit, when for some reason I mentioned this (I think because his dad uses butter all the time, to my mild disapproval), my adult son said, “Well, then, using olive oil for everything is the right way to cook, because your food is always delicious.” Why thanks, kiddo!
I thought the pendulum had swung back among a certain subset of self-proclaimed “manly men” ever since a certain politician revealed that he ate his steaks well-done with ketchup.
There’s something to be said for a distinction between regular and extra-virgin olive oil.
Extra-virgin is what you want if you are using it for a salad and want that specific flavour.
Regular is good for most frying or saute phases of mediterranean dishes.
I like to have both in stock.
Agreed. I keep extra virgin for salads.
Oh, I know - I was just being a brat! 
I suppose one might use mineral oil (years back, a colleague told me he saw a recipe that recommended doing that in salad dressing to save fat / calories; I suspect the results would be regrettable). Or animal oil; whale oil being the only one that I know of offhand, but that’s hard to find. Plus that would likely taste vile.
There are recipes for olive oil-based cakes; I’ve made one such recipe several times when a dairy-allergic relative was in town. The websites claim that the flavor shines through, somehow, though personally I’ve never noticed it. The results were tasty, in any event.
Storing them separately is one thing. But that doesn’t mean you have to cook them separately.
For my noodle dishes, I actually use just enough broth to be absorbed entirely into the noodles. The microwave makes this very easy. And the noodles actually tend to dry out a bit in the fridge, even when covered with a lid.
I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately made chicken noodle soup. But I definitely prefer there to be chicken flavoring in the noodles.
Yeah, I think even if you used a food safe mineral oil (like the stuff they use for salad bowls or glazing confectionery), the digestive results of ingesting anything more than a trace might be… explosive.
I’d say chicken fat (schmaltz) is an animal oil - it’s pretty much liquid at room temperature - if coconut oil is oil, then I’d say any kind of fat is oil - it’s not a chemical distinction as far as I know.
I haven’t found it to be too huge of a problem, keeping the noodles in the broth for a day or so in the fridge. Longer than that, and yeah, the noodles might break down too much. Certainly if I’m going to freeze the results, the noodles stay out until cooking time.
But if I think we’re going to use the entire soup in one meal (or only have a little left over), I’ll save a cooking pot and toss the noodles in when the soup boils.
I also nuke my tea with the tea bag in it, and in addition, I don’t let it steep nor do I let it approach a boil (which is inadvisable with a plastic cup anyway). To make it strong enough for its minimal dunking, I put two teabags in it. Two minimally-dunked teabags gives me more of the lighter, aromatic tastes from the tea and less of the heavy astringent stuff than one more thoroughly-dunked hot-water tea would.
One humorous exception which I also do wrong is when I am at a buffet and they have Earl Grey, I will do just a single teabag and let it steep, and then put in some milk.
When I’m in Britain and they serve me the pre-brewed stuff, I don’t complain, but even once I add milk to it to bring back the balance, it isn’t bad but also isn’t much better to my palate than my own stuff either.
On the noodles/broth controversy that is playing out in this thread, I am a firm believer of a lot of noodles and a small amount of extremely tasty broth. And lots of good chunks of vegetables and meat, of course.
Yes, the noodles swell up and absorb most of the broth, and when the leftovers are refrigerated, you end up with an aspic-textured glop, especially if your broth was a long-simmered collagen-rich liquid that would solidify in the fridge even if no noodles were involved.
When you reheat it, the “aspic” melts, leaving you with an extremely rich, porridge-like, stick-to-your ribs meal. Yum.
I’m famous for demanding this kind of thickness for all my soups: it is routinely understood by family and friends that anything I call “soup” would be called stew or porridge by anyone else.
I use a lot of instant potatoes to thicken up my soups. Occasionally, I use enough that it becomes soup-flavored mashed potatoes.
While I haven’t tried this, it makes total sense. I might give it a try.