oils--

[paula7]

Ok gang, we have coconut oil for cooking, olive oil for salads. Can anyone tell me about flax oil? I'm hearing that it's wonderful, and loaded with the omega fats. Is this something I should/could add to my list of healthy foods? And what about the flax seeds?

paula

[PlaneCrazy]

Don't cook with flax oil. It is easily damaged. There's also been a preliminary indication that there may be some slight increase in risk of prostate cancer in men from flax oil. Obviously from all of the qualifications in the previous sentence all is not definite. But, I'm prefering not to take the risk. Now, it seems that flax seed does not share this risk.

Flax oil and flax seed does indeed have plenty of the precursor for omega 3's. (can't remember which alphabet soup it is, but I'm sure someone will look it up) Your body does not convert all of the precursor into your omega 3 fatty acids but it also has other positive properties which others could tell you about in much more detail.

So, coconut is good for cooking (at moderate temperatures), olive oil is also good for sauteeing and over salads, and flax oil is good for adding after cooking or into applications where it won't get heated. Flax seeds are often sprinkled over salad or other things.

There's one oil you forgot, that's at least as stable as coconut and can take higher temperatures. It's also tasty and I've found I actually use less to get the same effect then I do with olive or coconut oil. That wonderous oil is LARD! There's a reason that our grandmother's cooking was so much better. She used lard.

So, lard, tallow, whatever you want to call it, use it! Make your own so you know what kind of quality is in it. It's easy, and very, very tasty.

Plane Crazy.

[paula7]

Actually, I thought I would use the flax meal with coconut milk.

Lard, eh? You think it's safer to make your own? Does that mean the lard at the grocery is not very good quality? My Mom used to use it for everything. Man, that woman could cook!

paula

[paula7]

I checked out the site, Plane. So, lard is from pig fat, suet is from the cow, and then there is bacon fat. And if 'taken' from your own pig/cow/bacon, they are not harmful--meaning, not hydrogenated? And safe to cook with at medium temps., right?

paula

[PlaneCrazy]

Yeah, it's the hydrogenation that you want to avoid, and most store-bought lard, if you can even find it nowadays, is hydrogenated. Plus, if you can get the scraps from someplace that sells organic meat then you can be sure that there're no pesticides in the fat. Pesticides and poisons tend to be fat soluable, whereas hormones and antibiotics tend not to be fat soluable. So, you may not get much of these nasty things in regular beef, but I'd rather be safe. I get mine from Whole Foods because they sell a better, and safer, cut of meat. 4 pounds of fat renders down to about 6 cups of lard. That's a lot of lard. It's not something you have to do often.

One small correction to your message. suet is a specific kind of fat. It's internal fat, specifically kidney fat from cows. Rendered beef fat is called tallow in the US, while rendered fat from pigs is called lard. I call mine lard just because I don't like the word "tallow". It reminds me of low-quality candles. And my rendered fat is a mixture of pork, beef and lamb. (tasty! :yum: )

You can cook in lard or tallow at medium heat, you can even deep fry in it. It's better to deep fry with tallow than with any other oil. So, go out there, make some lard and enjoy!!

Plane Crazy

[MichaelG]

In Australia at least, until just a few years ago MacDonald's fries were proudly fried in 100% pure beef tallow, and they announced the fact in their brochures.

Nowadays they probably use some sort of heat damaged carcinogenic stuff.

Michael
Australia

[paula7]

Yeah, the restaurants give what the majority demands, be it safe or unsafe, healthy or harmful. Guess that's how you make the bucks.

But it's not all their fault--sometimes they have no choice, if the government requires it. And when I was a vegan, these people were really nasty. They would draw up petitions and try to get doctors to add their names, to have any doctor or health professional reprimanded for advising his patients to do Atkins or any high protein diet. And they talked so badly about these diets and the people who do them. To say they were intolerant is putting it mildly. I could never sign one of these things, as I have always felt that one man's diet may be another man's poison, plus I had seen too many people get better on Atkins--one reason I was finally won over.

paula