First, let’s dispel some common misconceptions about oils.

The undeserved bad image of edible oils: Given the rampant prevalence of diabetes, everyone is wary of sugar. We can’t seem to cook anything non-sweet (except roti and rice) without salt, which is probably why we are reluctant to dwell over its serious dark side – why try to avoid the unavoidable?! But its insidious nature has been described in earlier posts. (Ref. Post 3: Health, happiness, life and food, Part II : Defining ‘food’ and using it smartly for smart use of sugar and salt.) However, edible oils present the most ironic case because they have serious food and physiological functionalities but have a poorly defined bad image.

The very mention of edible oils conjures up visions of fat bodies, disease (mostly heart and arteries), obesity, unhealthy and greasy fried dishes etc. Something to be avoided if you want to stay healthy or, at least, be considered health-conscious! Ironically, humungous amounts of oils (and fats) – sometimes of questionable quality – creep in unnoticed by way of fried bought-outs, ice-creams and frozen desserts, biscuits and cookies, ‘Punjabi and Mughlai’ dishes, processed oilseeds, sweets, etc.

Explanations for this ‘bad press’ about edible oils stem from what they are supposed to do to us, in excess and of wrong type or poor quality. The visible body fat or the adipose tissue in our body has been considered an indication of bad health and indicates abnormal blood lipid profile. ‘Tummy fat’ or abdominal obesity in particular, is considered a more direct indication of arterial and heart health vulnerability. But adipose tissue are the repositories of stored triglycerides from which they are drawn to derive energy when other sources are in short supply. And these triglycerides are also created form the extra carbohydrates in our diet alluding to the utility of such a conversion. Adipose tissue also protects delicate internal organs from physical shocks or jerks by acting as ‘shock absorbers’.

Cholesterol has been described as a ‘waxy substance’ belonging to the ‘sterol’ class of organic compounds and is found in higher animals like humans. Because of this association with life and close resemblance to oils in appearance, it has been clubbed under the ‘lipids’ umbrella with oils and fats but is, chemically, totally different. Cholesterol is essential for life and building of body tissue (children are often given cholesterol-rich dishes) and hdl-cholesterol level in blood is one of the strongest indicators of good health. Cholesterol is one of the least understood of body’s natural constituents and should be left well alone without drawing actionable wisdom from meager knowledge.

In any case, egg-avoiding, low fat vegetarian diet is unlikely to raise blood cholesterol in a healthy body because all natural plant source oils contain practically no cholesterol. When a total vegetarian suddenly adopts active non-vegetarianism; such a dietary cholesterol shock can raise blood cholesterol levels because of liver’s struggle to deal with sudden load.

Don’t instinctively blame oils for everything! : Many factors – our fondness for fried and oily/fatty snacks and dishes, sedentary lifestyle, inherited tendencies and metabolic traits and excessive carbohydrate consumption – contribute to obesity which gives rise to several serious chronic conditions. Thus obesity is a multi-factorial ‘condition’ rather than a disease, rightly equated with ‘being fat’ but not necessarily connected with edible oil consumption as we will see in detail later.

Decades back, Chemical Engineering students of IIT, Kanpur found out that most frying oils used by road-side halwai’s contained non-edible mineral oil (originating in crude petroleum) which allows the samosa and pakaude – low on nutrition in any case – to be crisp without off-flavours. This enables them to be fried for extended periods in shallow frying pans open to air, giving highly dehydrated (and caramelized) and hence crisp (‘khasta’) pastry-like casings. Thus negatives of bought-outs like samosa stem from the quality of frying and spurious frying oil.

So a smartly home-made samosa, especially as light dinner, combined with a proteinaceous gravy and a bowl of freshly chopped fruit is a neat, light dinner. (Note: 1. This eliminates multiple samosa for dinner. 2. This is an adaptation of the ‘chaat style’ where a samosa is pressed on a plate, doused with a liquid chutney and sometimes garnished with coriander and/or ‘sev’. 3. This automatically eliminates samosa as the 5 pm snack. 4. You can develop a series of stunning gravies with any combination of boiled peas/rajma/chhole/soybean, tomato, fresh  mint, coriander, tamarind, dates, green chillies, garlic, onion, salt, dry spices……). The fried, dry, bought-out snacks – namkeens in general – can be bad because of bad frying oil or its repeated use and that perennial enemy: salt and cooking soda. Note again that oils, per se’, are not to blame.

But home-made ‘sev’ or ‘khasta puri’ or bhujia or samosa and pakaude or papadi for chaat or sakkarpare and namakpare are fine as occasional snacks as long as the frying oil is smartly chosen (we will come to that in a post soon), frying is smartly done and the spent oil is either used in wick-diyas or diluted with fresh oil and gradually used as shortening (moin) in routine cooking. Note how this automatically makes snacks occasional. French fries and potato wafers or chips – arguably the most popular fried snacks worldwide – contain traces of ‘acrylamide’ which is carcinogenic. Again, don’t give oils a bad name! Thus our lack of alertness, knowledge and commitment to health and genuine happiness fall short – something that we don’t want to acknowledge. So we simply hang the blame on the nearest peg which, in case of food, is often oils!

Oils, a versatile processing/cooking aid: Oils or fats are extensively used by industry and at home as processing/cooking aids and as ingredients. In all cases, they become parts of products delivering improvement in texture, mouth-feel, flavor, color and lubrication in the mouth, of products. These are all non-physiological roles (outside our body), the physiological roles happen on their own anyway. Here’s an overview of main specific roles in domestic cooking:

• – Frying of any kind is not possible without oils; note that its water equivalent is ‘boiling’ – one reduces water and the other increases it.  So French fries, ‘fryums’, namkeen, samosa and pakaude, potato and other chips, puri, chaat…owe their very possibility to oils. Frying is a simple-looking but interesting and popular food processing/cooking operation. Frying essentially transfers flame heat across the vessel bottom to the oil which duly transfers it to whatever is being fried, resulting in oil-mediated drying and cooking. Fried products enjoy wide popularity because of distinctive texture, flavor, color, mouth-feel and richness imparted by the oil-mediated hot process.
• – Moin or shortening is the oil (or ghee) that you add to the wheat flour for making roti, puri, bread, cakes, biscuits and cookies….It ensures that high moisture dishes do not become leathery on keeping and the low moisture ones stay crisp and ‘khasta’.
• – Unrefined oils as accompaniments to daily dishes: Eating many home-made dishes with fresh – usually unrefined – oils is a typically Indian custom. (Though Sunny Corleone did mop up fresh olive oil – probably with a chopped olive or two – with a loaf of bread in ‘The Godfather’).  Gujarati’s swear by groundnut oil as an accompaniment to khaman, dhokla, handvo and similar baked or steamed low-oil dishes. In many parts of Gujarat, a spoonful of ghee (anhydrous milk fat) on the ripe mango juice (aamras) along with a pinch of dry ginger powder (sonth) is common. I have grown up having it during summers.

South India has a rich tradition of dry chutney powders ‘moistened’ with groundnut or coconut or sesame oil eaten with the customary snacks and meals – some of them, heavenly. Note that all oil coming in with the food acts as moin or acompaniment also enriches mouth-feel and lubricates swallowing.

• – Griddle (Tava)-cooked flat dishes: Your favourite dosa, uttappam, appams, chille (pudla or puda in Gujarati), French fried toast, pancakes, etc. pick up the flame heat relayed across the thickness of metal. This is facilitated by the oil film which establishes a good thermal contact between the upper skin of the griddle and the batter circle   to get cooked and come off smoothly from the hot plate. Now ceramic-coated non-sticks are available; they allow you to be less than razor alert because of dampened rate of heat transfer up the griddle-dish combo. Avoid Teflon non-sticks.
• – Ghee: Hot roti (chapatti), bajri roti (rotla in Gujarati), and khichdi owe their attraction to ghee. And the ubiquitous bread and loaf (pao), to butter. And then there are naan, kulche, bhature… And the absolutely criminal ghee-hot rice-salt combination!
• – Oil as a functional dish component: Luscious upama (and suji halwa or sheera) is possible only because of the initial roasting of ‘suji’ in oil which helps develop flavor and minimizes sticking together of grains when the dish is finished with water. Can anything beat turmericy upama with shredded tomato, capsicum and beetroot served in a white plate? A few years ago, upama served on a bed of stir-fried asparagus stems won the best dish award at a US competition.
• – Indian style sweets: Ghee or milk fat is critical in giving Indian style sweet dishes (mohanthaal, barfi, halwas, pedhe, laddu, winter tonics, kaju katli, etc.) their typical hard-but-‘yielding’ texture. Fried sweets like gulab jamun, khaja, jalebi, ghevar have ghee helping both with cooking and flavor/texture development. And don’t you ‘grease’ your thali or trays with ghee before pouring in cooked slab dishes? And the mould, with oil before baking?
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  Oil in daily daals and subji’s:  How the subji dish gets its familiar character from the way it is cooked is a separate post topic. But note how oil picks up the flavours or extracts from the initial ‘tadaka’ or ‘jhonk’ or ‘bhaghar’ (vaghar in Gujarati) with mustard, hing (asafoetida), turmeric, red chillies, cumin, carom seeds, coriander seeds, fennel seeds etc. and then distributes the flavours (and colours) throughout the dish. Astonishingly, it is helped by its arch enemy – water – in doing this! Note how oil separates out when in large quantity making the dish rich in appearance and poor in health. The same applies to daals and sambhaar.  Prepare South Indian sambhar hours in advance for the complex spice flavours to get thoroughly extracted out both by water and the oil, and distributed throughout the bulk.

• – Among miscellaneous home-mades, ghee is an integral part of ‘Chyavanprash’ which helps give it its attractive gooey texture along with a near-saturated sugar syrup and some amla carbohydrates.  Our yearly pickles are not possible without oil.
• – The special case of molded bar chocolates: These unabashedly elitist products are ‘carried’ entirely by their fat content (called ‘cocoa butter’) which can vary from 30 to 50 % of the product. Chocolate’s ‘melt-in-the-mouth’ quality that quickly releases its sweetness and flavors in the mouth is the result of the unique ‘melting profile’ of the cocoa butter which gives its crystallized from (straight from the fridge) a fast decreasing solid content with increase in temperature. Simply put, chocolate’s crystal matrix quickly breaks down into liquid on absorbing heat from the mouth creating a distinct cooling effect. This is in addition to the coolness coming from the fridge.
• When you snap a bar straight from the fridge, atmospheric heating is slow and the crystal network mechanically breaks in the middle the way a wooden strip would. The grooves on most bars are ‘designed weaknesses’ in those bars that make them break in roughly measured rectangles so that sharing with someone you love, is facilitated.  Both the properties stem from cocoa butter’s inherent triglyceride (or triacylglycerol) make-up and ‘tempering’ of the solid chocolate by melting it just above butter’s melting point and then cooling it. This delicate process ensures that cocoa butter crystallizes (or solidifies) in a ‘guided’ way that creates millions of small crystal agglomerates sticking (‘snappy’) together rather than fewer large or ‘coarse’ crystals loosely held by liquid. Early chocolate makers melted the formulated chocolate by stirring with hand (which is a source of soft heat at about 37 deg C) and then chilling it.
• Sounds terribly mushy but chocolates should be made, not manufactured. Presently, there is world-wide shortage of cocoa and chocolate prices are rising. The obvious solution is to reduce dependence on cocoa butter in the formulation. Note that bar chocolate is a totally dry (water-less) product with a lot of fat and added sugar and no protein (except for traces in ‘milk chocolate’) or dietary fiber. Time may have come to develop a novel chocolate variant that has mass appeal, is smartly nutritious and offers an enjoyable, if different eating experience. (Ref Post 15: Oxygen, food and life: Part I, How oxygen mediates in life and food processing).

Typical roles of oils in some processed foods:

1. 1. Salad dressings: Richness. Mouth-feel. Flavour. Gloss. Bio-availability of oil-solubles in the salad.
2. 2. Biscuits and cookies: Shortening. Richness. Mouth-feel. Lubrication.
3. 3. Margarines and spreads: Mimicking milk-fat as in dairy butter.
4. 4. Chyavanprash: Bio-availability of oil-solubles. Richness. Flavour. Texture.
5. 5. Soups: Richness. Mouth-feel. Flavor, if dairy butter or olive oil. Bio-availability of oil-solubles.

Hope you enjoyed the ‘simplified food science in cooking’ in this post; health and happiness thru food is simple, really!

Next Post:

The physiological functions of edible oils

They do a lot for us within our body

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