Maybe we should forget about the ease of deep fat frying. We really don't
have much to put in one. Don.

Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1998 22:31:40 +0000
To: Don Wiss <[log in to unmask]>
From: Jack Campin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: "Best" Oil for Deep Fat Frying (fwd)

> First let me define "best." We are a bunch of people that believe in a
> Paleolithic way of eating. This means no foods that require technology to
> make it edible. I was thinking of buying a deep fat fryer for my home. So
> best would be something that not only would be good for frying, but able to
> last sitting on the counter.

Leaving food lying about in the Paleolithic meant some animal ate it for
you.  Pottery is a later invention, and you can neither render animal fats
nor extract and store vegetable oils without it (or metal containers,
even later).

> The only oils they seem like a possibility are lard, rendered beef fat,
> coconut oil, and olive oil. The only lard I've found has hydrogenated lard
> as the second ingredient and lots of chemicals.

In the UK, pure lard is no problem, and is available in any supermarket.
Olive oil cannot have been made before settled agriculture; and it is not
very heat-stable.  Beef suet might not be all that easy to get for domestic
use (though is possible in this country) but it is widely used in industry
(either directly in baking or as a feedstock for making stearic acid
derivatives) so there must be commercial supplies of it somewhere, if you
can only locate them.

> These are the very things we are trying to avoid. Rendered beef fat seems
> like a possibility, but as far as we know it would be something we make
> for ourselves. I'd rather not.  Coconut oil supposedly lasts forever. It
> is expensive. Then how good is olive oil under the heat?

Coconut oil is, I think, a modern product.  In Polynesia it was never used
as food, only as a lubricant or skin lotion, and produced only in small
quantities - I suppose this may have been different when the Polynesians
still had pottery, but they haven't for the last 2000 years.  They are also
genetically among the least able to handle saturated fats of any people on
the planet; remember that fish was always an important food for them.  And
it certainly doesn't last forever, if the rancid smell I can detect in old
coconut oil means anything.

> What did people deep fry with in the past, before people became fanatical
> about saturated fats?

By and large, they didn't fry at all.  Native Americans never developed any
dishes involving frying as we would recognize it (their nearest approximation
was spreading flatbreads over greased heated stones).  It's an impossibly
difficult process if you don't have the right cookware, and you can't make
the right utensils out of Palaeolithic materials with Palaeolithic tools.

Palm oil might be a reasonable bet for frying with, albeit it's no more
Palaeolithic than olive.  It's highly saturated, so won't degrade at high
temperature, and is a good dietary source of vitamin A.

Other oils used for food that only require palaelithic technology are fish
oils and the oil extracted from fulmars (a kind of big seagull) on some of
the remotest outlying islands of Scotland like St Kilda.  Pretty much every
report of such foods by visitors from anywhere else amounted to "Blechhh!",
be it in English, Norwegian or mediaeval Latin.  And if you don't already
have zoning laws to stop you boiling down barrels of dead seagull in your
back yard, I'd bet City Hall would get one out in record time if you tried.

But forget about that deep fat fryer.  In the home, those things have no
redeeming features whatever.  Industrial deep fat frying is a very different
process; typically, a fryer for potato crisps or puffed corn products turns
over its oil completely in twenty minutes.  That's less time to degrade than
a domestic user would get in preparing a single meal, let alone leaving the
stuff to fossilize for weeks as you're suggesting; plain potato crisps out
of a packet will have fresher fats than any fried food you could make.  Also,
deep frying is a major cause of domestic fires and severe accidental burns.
If you are doing it, make damn sure you have both a fire blanket and an
extinguisher handy and that everyone in the household knows how to use both.

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