Keeping oil? | Imamother

zaq

Thu, May 26 2022, 11:17 am

You can reuse the oil. Strain it to remove any solids and refrigerate. The oil will obviously have a strong garlic smell and taste, so don't use it for anything incompatible with that. It would be superb in salad dressing. Be aware, though, that you shouldn't reuse oil more than once. You'd be better off using the oil in salad dressing than frying with it. Every time you heat oil, chemical reactions produce unhealthy compounds that can't be strained out. Among other reactions, healthier cis-fats are converted to unhealthy trans-fats. Unsaturated fats become saturated. Antioxidants like Vitamin E are destroyed. This happens even the first time you heat the oil but gets worse the more times you reuse it.

If cooking oil is heated to the point at which it smokes, the oil breaks down and produces carcinogenic compounds. Olive oil, which has a lower smoking point than other vegetable oils, is more prone to this than oils with higher smoke points, and extra virgin olive oil has a lower smoke point than ordinary olive oil.

You'd be best off, from a health standpoint, cooking your garlic-in-oil in the oven, where the temperatures are lower than in a frying pan, or sauteeing your garlic in a very small quantity of oil so that there's none left over.