Professional fry cooks keep some of their old oil to prime a new batch. Oil that’s been used at least once fries better.
You have to realize that all the oil in deep frying is doing is conducting heat to the food. Sure, it gets somewhat damaged in that process, and isn’t good for other types of cooking where it accomplishes more, but it’s still perfectly usable for another batch. You can repeat this until it gets cloudy or smoky.
Still, you do eventually have to dispose of the oil. I personally would just put it in a container and throw it away, after maybe giving some to the dogs. But I know one famous cook who donates it to be used to make biodiesel.
Solid fats from duck, goose, pork and sometimes beef get saved for use in roasting potatoes later.
Other leftover solid fats (lamb, which is too waxy) are cooled in a dish and scraped into my food waste recycling bin, which is collected weekly and carted off to a facility that makes methane, biodiesel and fertiliser.
(A very small amount of leftover solid fat is reserved for use with my Lard Lamp - but I probably won’t use this in earnest until the zombie apocalypse)
I seldom have any significant amounts of leftover liquid fats/oils - I either re-use them or wait until something absorbent (stale bread, etc) is in the food waste bin, then soak it into that.
Wrong. I think this is all a big sham. I’ve been doing the exact same thing Omniscient does my whole life. At forty, I have yet to see this clogging you speak of. And I’m a home owner if that makes a difference.
I don’t really cook at home and I wouldn’t fry stuff if I did. I’m more of a noodle boiling or microwaving type. But when I was growing up we put hot grease down the drain with a lot of soap and extremely hot water, and we never had to call a plumber that I can recall.
My brother-in-law dumped a can of grease down our drain a couple of years ago, and it instantly clogged the garbage disposal. Just to throw that out there.
Mostly though I just wanted to point out for the benefit of any home soapmakers reading this who might have been intrigued by PSXer’s suggestion up-thread: Do not turn leftover cooking oils into soap unless you are really into the idea of meat-scented soap. Which maybe could be fun as a novelty, but is really not what you want to smell like when you step out of the shower most days. At least, I don’t.
About three or four times a year we like to fondu and I’ve always just put the oil back in the container it came in (after it’s cooled) and throw it in the garbage.
I don’t deep-fry, but the oil from other things, I mostly end up eating somehow or another. Usually whatever I was frying for in the first place needs the fat, anyway.
I learned last season on Weeds that you trade it to hippies for their bud scraps. They use it to power their car and you use the scraps to make hash in the dryer.
I’ve never deep-fried at home. If I have leftover oil from a saute I just sop it up with a bunch of folded-up paper towels and toss in the trash. Other family I know well enough to know what’s in their cabinets, they pour into old jars until the jar is full then throw that in the trash. I suppose I could do the same, but unless I use little jars I’ll have that around for a while, and find it a bit gross to have a jar of used oil under the sink when I can just as well throw it out after it’s soaked into paper towels.
I stay away from anything fried any more, anyway. I had fries yesterday for the first time in a few months and I felt sick until this afternoon from them. I’m a little sad about it, but it’s better in the long run, I guess.
I put it back in the original container. Then eventually it goes in the trash, the back corner of the lot, down the drain (small amounts), or occasionally in the grease dumpster of a friend who has a restaurant. I have a couple of large oil buckets currently filled with old oil waiting for a convenient time to dump them. If you take it to a renderer they might take it off your hands for free. There’s also people home-brewing their bio-fuel now, they’d love to take it off your hands.
True about older oil making for better frying, at least in part. I thought it was an old wives tale until I started frying potatoes regularly, but it’s not.
Some of you are making me feel bad about (a) not drinking it and (b) throwing it away with the trash. But I get a lot of use out of each few quarts of old oil, even though it is probably not the best for one’s health, so I don’t dispose of it much, since I don’t deep-fry all that often anymore. My mother had a tip (dubious!) which was that one pour it on the English Ivy growing outside. I guess that can’t be worse than trashing it.
Never tried lighting it on fire for arson or otherwise repurposing it, which could be an option for those inclined.
I have fond memories of my aunt’s fries from when I was a kid. She would bake them on a cookie sheet in the oven instead of frying them. Maybe that kind of preparation might be a better idea? Less mess and they were very delicious.
Fat that will solidify (except bacon fat): Mix it with bird seed and keep it frozen for winter food blocks for birds.
Bacon fat: Keep it in a tin in the freezer for later cooking. More then a tin in reserve gets treated as above.
Cooking Oils that just stay liquid: Pour it over the Saturday night bonfire before lighting and let it soak into the wood and whatever.
