Cooking with olive oil

From Tom Muller’s book Extra Virginity, we got a glimpse of how olive oil is beneficial for health and its amazing curing ability. Those people who consume olive oil professionally would take 2 tablespoons per day. But as an amateur like me, who does love the special taste of olive oil, but finds it hard to just drink oil directly, trying to cook food with olive oil would be a better option.

Olive oil is at its best when it’s fresh and un-heated. And over-heating of the olive oil would damage the composition and lose some of the nutrition in the oil. In cooking, the concept smoking point is the temperature at which at cooking fat or oil begins to break down. When it breaks down, it gives food a burned taste. High quality extra virgin olive oil has a high smoking point because there is lower concentration of fatty acids; vice versa, the low quality blended oils have much lower smoking points. The IOOC states that the extra virgin olive oil has a high smoking point of 210^oC, and frying with olive oil for several times doesn’t give bad affects to the oil, unlike the seed oil. Because the virgin olive oil has highly monounsaturated fats, it keeps hydrogenation and oxidation away. So even highly heated, olive oil wouldn’t impact our health. This is pretty amazing!

Mediterranean diet is highly promoted to patients with heart disease, and also the public because it’s definitely a lot healthier. I like to add olive oil to my salads or fry vegetables with them, in the Asian way. Olive oil is better when cooked with vegetables, carbs, chicken (white meat) or fish because they don’t have a lot of fat, and the healthy fat in olive oil would give the dish not only a special touch of flavor, but also some great nutrition values. If cooking meat with olive oil it would seem a bit pointless because it has higher composition of fat and it won’t be much healthier when cooked with olive oil. My Asian way of cooking vegetables is just to simply stir fry string beans, broccoli, fungi, or Chinese cabbages with olive oil and salt. It would bring up the taste of the vegetable and a tint of olive oil flavor. Grilled asparagus would taste great with olive oil, then add some crushed garlic and salt. Yummmmm I’m getting hungry. I found the recipe of this delicious salad “chargrilled courgette with basil, mint, chilli and lemon” that's totally easy to prepare on BBC food. Enjoy!

Ingredients

·       6 courgettes, ends trimmed, cut into long strips

·       1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for dressing

·       1 fresh red chilli, seeded, finely chopped (or 5 tsp dried chilli flakes)

·       sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

·       ½ lemon, juice only

·       handful fresh mint, roughly chopped

·       handful fresh basil, roughly chopped

Preparation method

1.     Toss the courgette strips in a bowl with the olive oil (just enough to coat the courgette), chilli, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

2.     Heat a ridged grill pan until smoking hot and griddle the courgettes in batches, about four minutes per side, being careful not to crowd the grill pan. They should be tender, but with a crunch to them in the middle. If the strips are not quite cooked, leave them on the grill pan for longer, but watch the heat as you don't want them to burn. Don't be tempted to move the courgette while it is cooking or you won't get the chargrill marks across the flesh. Drain on kitchen paper.

3.     Toss the griddled courgettes in the lemon juice, mint, basil and a good slug of your best extra virgin olive oil.

 Reference:

Heating Olive Oil 

http://www.oliveoilsource.com/page/heating-olive-oil

Chargrilled courgette with basil, mint, chilli and lemon

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/chargrilledcourgette_85172