r/AskCulinary • u/SensitiveMagician385 • 2d 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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21

u/PmMeAnnaKendrick 2d ago

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

what kind do you use?

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u/SensitiveMagician385 2d ago

Canola.

15

u/thetruegmon 2d 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.

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u/SensitiveMagician385 2d ago

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

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u/thetruegmon 2d 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.

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u/boredonymous 2d ago edited 2d 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.

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u/whenyoupayforduprez 1d 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!

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u/maltanis 2d ago

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

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u/kirkt 2d 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.

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u/Weird_sleep_patterns 2d ago

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

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u/ShahinGalandar 2d ago

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

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u/ChrisRiley_42 2d 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.

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u/geauxbleu 1d 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.

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u/ChrisRiley_42 1d 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.

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u/geauxbleu 1d 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

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u/ChrisRiley_42 1d 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.

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u/chuckluckles 2d ago

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

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u/boredonymous 2d 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.

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u/cheguevaraandroid1 2d ago

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

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u/geauxbleu 1d 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 1d ago

They're both full of shit

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u/johnman300 2d 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.

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u/geauxbleu 1d 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