Let Food Lift Life

After enjoying popularity as a purposeful oil modification technique for decades, nature ultimately caught up with man’s audacity in changing the nature of edible oils thru hydrogenation. Today, you are not smart and health-aware enough if you don’t bristle at the mention of TFA even if you otherwise continue to consume fried bought outs containing spurious and harmfully altered oils, air-fry extensively at home, imbibe significant quatities of synthetic anti-oxidants, ignore your rising BMI and stay unaware of your blood…

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Like all technologies, hydrogenation has had its own ‘market-pull, science-push’ trajectory and unfortunately, its own, long drawn out, emerge-submerge fate!     Evolution of the process condition-product quality linkages In the previous post, we touched upon the conditions-trajectory-product quality-product functionality linkages, essentially the relative rates of the series hydrogenation of PUFA to MUFA to SFA and parallel isomerization of cis bonds to trans. (We are deliberately ignoring positional isomerization that results from migration of the residual double bonds up and down…

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(It will be useful to keep visiting the previous post for context.) Why we hydrogenate edible oils  (Note: It must be remembered in all discussions going forward that TFA have made hydrogenation for food applications ‘persona non grata’. The continued discussion is meant to describe an elegant chemical technology which teaches us a lot and which may still have many uses as we will see later). Since pretty much all organic ‘unsaturation’ in the form of double bonds (not necessarily…

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(Ref post no. 17, Edible oils: An introduction, for most clarifications that you may need here. Referring to other relevant posts may also be useful). In the previous post, we saw what technology is and how it grows in dimensions with time. In this post, we will see how ‘hydrogenation of edible oils for food uses’ took birth as science, became a technology and set off in its own special trajectory. There is also a semi-personal history behind my passion…

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Prelude: This post is meant to be a primer to the posts to follow and starts with the removal of ‘innovation’ from a pedestal and introduces it as something that you can make a way of life. This is meant to explain how that spirit led to some ‘original’ thinking on some intricate aspects of a particular chemical technology – presented later – and created useful insights. Also an introduction to the nuances of the term ‘Tehnology’ and its evolution…

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The fixed composition of oils vs. the consumption recommendations: The idea of ‘ideal’ oil consumption is a relatively recent construct that stemmed from the developing insights in our physiology, especially metabolism.  As already noted, it immediately got complicated because of the immense variety in body types and, within each, variables like environmental factors, heredity, pre-existing conditions, physical activity levels etc. This was largely circumvented by basing those quantity recommendations on the individual’s ‘calorie requirement’, tacitly factoring in most variations stemming…

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Here are details of just how Geeta estimates her total visible oil consumption at home thru calculation of depletion of her stocks which, being mathematical, is reliable and relatable. But apportioning that total quantity to individual members is a delicious challenge. A couple of comparable real life parallels: 1. How to allocate your net income to expenditure and savings and savings to fixed and variable income instruments of investments. 2.  Determining how your staff sees its working conditions. So we…

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The utility of even approximate individual oil consumption: Expectedly, it is difficult to accurately calculate consumption of oils in terms of quantities by individual members of the family. Undaunted, we have worked out the modalities of closely estimating it given its importance. Oil/fat consumption is an important dietary determinant of an individual’s physiological-analytical parameters like the blood lipid profile, externally observed features like BMI and felt experiences like agility or lethargy. These, in turn, can be strong predictors of serious…

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We now understand that oils are our friends if we have insights in their nature as cooking media. Obviously, smart coking with oils must start with using the right oil in every cooking episode. As a refresher,  the following conditions must be met concurrently for that: The oils should not be altered harmfully during cooking i.e. the cooked food, with oil as a part of it, should be safe as well as tasty (or, at least, free from off-flavors) to…

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How Indian domestic cooking with edible oils is different: In the last post, we noted how industry treats edible oils for its product offerings which is different from what we do at home. HoReCa and organized, billed distribution of ready-to-eats understandably have cooking features borrowed from the industry and domestic cooking. They also have some special (and sometimes unscrupulous) tricks, given their compulsions and freedoms. However, it is interesting to note some specialties of Indian cooking with edible oils at…

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