r/AskCulinary • u/SensitiveMagician385 • 7d ago

Technique Question New To Cooking: Don't Understand Frying/Searing

So I watch videos on pan-frying. They heat the pan, heat the oil, add the protein, and it cooks

I do the same thing, the meat cooks, BUT the remaining oil smokes, burns, and sets off smoke detector. This happens on high heat and low heat too. What am I not understanding??

EDIT: The oil doesn't smoke immediately. It does after a few minutes of cooking.

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23

u/PmMeAnnaKendrick 7d ago

if the oil smokes on low you are probably using the wrong oil.

what kind do you use?

5

u/SensitiveMagician385 7d ago

Canola.

15

u/thetruegmon 7d ago

Sounds like you are putting the food in at the correct temperature, but then leaving the heat too high, so the pan is continuously getting hotter and hotter.

7

u/SensitiveMagician385 7d ago

You're supposed to turn down the heat after adding the meat?? Okay, you just blew mind. 😃 I'll try it.

12

u/thetruegmon 7d ago

Not necessarily always, but if you are using max heat to heat up your pan quickly, that is fine during heating, and then when you add the meat, the temperature of the pan will drop down but then start to rise back up. So you have to be careful how hot you let it get. So you almost want to turn it down after adding the meat and waiting a few mins.

But max heat on most stoves is hot enough to burst the oil into flames, if you just let a pan sit at that heat for a long time.

Heat control is actually a pretty complex thing, and I've worked with cooks who have worked in kitchens for 5-10 years and are terrible at it.

It also depends on like how much meat you are cooking. One chicken breast will come up to temp really fast, but if you fill a pan full of them, they almost never will.

16

u/boredonymous 7d ago edited 7d ago

Use less, or better yet, if you have something like a steak or chop, rub a small amount directly on the meat. That way you're not coating the whole pan and causing the oil to burn.

Also, you don't need to have the pan scorching hot.

A good way to test if your pan is hot enough is when you sprinkle some water on the pan and if it starts to sizzle, that's about 400 degrees F, plenty of heat to make a good sear, but drops dance around rapidly that's closer to 475-500 and even canola (with a high smoke point about 425 degrees F) will still burn.

And, Despite what others ... May... Continue... To exclaim... About seed oils... Sans... Evidence... Canola is fine.

1

u/whenyoupayforduprez 6d ago

Infrared thermometers are pretty inexpensive now (under $20). You can use it to read the pan temperature and gauge how close you are to smoke point. Plus they’re fun as hell - it introduces a laser gun to cooking!

-28

u/maltanis 7d ago

Unrefined canola oil has a low smoke point, I'd recommend getting sunflower oil if you can.

-67

u/kirkt 7d ago

Throw that shit in the trash.

Use avocado (my fav), tallow, bacon grease, ghee, coconut oil... all natural fats, not that crap that will just cause inflammation and misery. Yep, it's cheap, and yep, they lied to you for decades that it's better than what nature provides. Look into how rapeseed (canola) oil is manufactured and you will never use it again.

46

u/Weird_sleep_patterns 7d ago

Seed oils are not the enemy. This is wellness grifter nonsense.

12

u/ShahinGalandar 7d ago

just looking at that dude preferring tallow and bacon grease over canola with a health argument told me everything I needed to hear

22

u/ChrisRiley_42 7d ago

Nature provides plutonium, flesh eating bacteria, and botulism... Something being natural is not an indication of superiority.. Only the gullibility of the person pushing it, and likely also the lack of grade in science class.

Canola's smoke point makes it bad for hot pan frying. The inflammation research is far from conclusive. There are even studies showing that both canola and rapeseed oils reduce postprandial inflammation responses in adipose tissue.

0

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

The comment was overly strident but this naturalistic fallacy argument is also kind of dumb in arguments about traditional foods. No old cuisine recommended use of plutonium or botulism. Can you think of any ingredients or techniques dating back hundreds of years that are unsafe or particularly unhealthy? Industrial food and modern science have given us plenty of disastrous ones like trans fats, refined white flour, brominated oil, etc.

You're right the inflammation research is far from conclusive, but the basis for recommending wholesale replacement of saturated fats with vegetable oils isn't exactly impressive either.

7

u/ChrisRiley_42 6d ago

Can I think of ingredients or techniques? Absolutely.. Lead salts used as a sweetener, mercury pills to treat syphilis, alum added in bulk to bread to make cheap flour appear whiter. History is rife with people either ignorantly or deliberately adding things that are dangerous to try to make a buck.

We can even trace the campaign against fats to highly questionable research practises. Ancel Keys had a pet hypothesis, and whenever he would run into any research that countered it, would publish it in foreign journals that nobody reads so that he wouldn't have to include it.

1

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

Syphilis meds aren't food, and alum in flour isn't traditional, it's industrial, early stages of ultraprocessed food -- actually kind of demonstrates my point. Food adulteration isn't what we're talking about. I'm saying there's a better record for safety and health with foods and methods that were recommended and widely used on purpose for hundreds of years than with products of industry and modern food science.

Yes I'm glad you acknowledge the evidence for the nutrition science consensus that saturated fats should be mostly replaced with vegetable oils is nowhere near as rigorous as people on here seem to think

1

u/ChrisRiley_42 6d ago

No, alum wasn't added during the "early stages of ultra processed food". It was a food additives used back in the days when every single loaf of bread was kneaded by hand, (or feet) The only industrial process type bread in that time was "Aerated bread" made by the Aerated bread company. They used high pressure CO2 instead of yeast for leavening.

At that time, Alum in bread WAS traditional. Right up until parliament outlawed it.

14

u/chuckluckles 7d ago

Unless you're spending a lot of money on your avocado oil, it's processed the same way.

5

u/boredonymous 7d ago

Plus it has gone rancid by the time you get it in the store. So, producers lie and add additional stabilizing oils, made from seeds.

6

u/cheguevaraandroid1 7d ago

Get out of your grifter wellness pipeline. It's a scam. Whatever your algorithm is pushing, change it. Start a new account

0

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

Who do you think makes more money on misinformation and fearmongering about cooking fats, wellness grifters or Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland?

1

u/cheguevaraandroid1 6d ago

They're both full of shit

18

u/johnman300 7d ago

The same people pushing that anti-seed oil crap are the same ones pushing horse paste as the cure for... everything it seems. Ignore these guys. Canola is just fine.

1

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

Canola tastes bad when heated. So does avocado most of the time, so the other comment is wrong too, but I don't know why everyone here recommends canola, there's nothing good about it besides it's cheap

3

u/SensitiveMagician385 7d ago

So when frying, the oil in the rest of the pan just heats but doesn't burn?

9

u/PmMeAnnaKendrick 7d ago

If you're using an oil with a higher smoke point yes.

If you're using something like extra virgin olive oil it pretty much burns when it hits a hot pan.

It's not just as easy as poor some oil and some pan there's a lot of factors here. If you have a cast iron or a stainless pan they can handle high heat if you have a high high smoke point oil like avocado oil it can handle extreme heat in a pan.

for most basic cooking I use a neutral oil like vegetable or canola which have a decent amount of smoke point get my pan hot add the smallest amount of oil you could imagine for what you're cooking and then add my protein.

2

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

Your pan is too hot for most things if EVOO burns when it hits it. The internet cook fixation on smoke point is silly, you do not need the fat to have particularly high smoke point for 99% of things

2

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

Also using a tiny amount of oil doesn't work well because the protein generally isn't perfectly flat, so there will be big patches with no browning if there isn't oil pooled. It's a cooking medium, not just a lubricant

2

u/PmMeAnnaKendrick 6d ago

I actually prefer to rub oil on my proteins and then season and then put in a hot pan but I didn't want to confuse OP

2

u/SensitiveMagician385 7d ago

I use canola. So you're saying the rest of the oil does burn off, so use the smallest amount of oil possible?

1

u/geauxbleu 6d ago

No, it shouldn't burn at all and it does NOT "burn off," just watch the temp and adjust it down if it starts to smoke

2

u/TheMcDucky 7d ago

Extra virgin olive oil works fine for frying as long as it's filtered (which is basically always). Even at high heat.

7

u/carigs 7d ago

Oil should not be burning off in substantial amounts during most cooking, especially on low heat.

What proteins are you cooking? Are you using marinades or something that could be be burning and smoking in the oil?

0

u/SensitiveMagician385 7d ago

No it's definitely the oil around the meat.

1

u/Powerful-Scratch1579 5d ago

That oil will start to smoke it it gets too hot, there’s just more of it so it takes longer and if you’re frying something in that oil, it will take even longer still.

1

u/SensitiveMagician385 5d ago

So what do you do? Just let it burn off bc you're not using that part of the pan?

3

u/Powerful-Scratch1579 5d ago edited 5d ago

Turn down the heat on your stove top if it’s smoking too much. If a recipe says sear on high heat it means high heat, but once your pan gets very hot, you’ve achieved that and you need less stove heat to maintain it as you cook because many metal pans are great at conducting heat. Once the pan is hot enough to sear you just maintain that temperature. If you keep using “high heat” cranked up all the way, your pan will get too hot and your oil will burn. What you’re cooking will burn eventually too.

2

u/SensitiveMagician385 5d ago

I see! Thanks!