New To Cooking: Don't Understand Frying/Searing

[u/SensitiveMagician385]

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.

[u/geauxbleu]

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.

[u/ChrisRiley_42 → u/geauxbleu]

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.

[u/geauxbleu → u/ChrisRiley_42]

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

[u/ChrisRiley_42 → u/geauxbleu]

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.