What Restaurant Operators Should Know About Cooking Oil

While achieving quality and consistency in the kitchen is an art form, every chef and cook is also a chemist, who continually develops knowledge of how various foods and ingredients "react" with each other to produce quality cuisine. One of the most important compounds in the kitchen "laboratory" is cooking oil.

The back-of-the-house maestro must be familiar with the qualities and characteristics of the varieties of cooking oil available to him, including canola, corn and soy oil to the more exotic avocado, flaxseed, grape seed, and walnut oil -- not to mention flavored oils.

Experience and training will guide the chef or kitchen manager in which is best for what use; however, some things are best learned through study, rather than trial and error. Even the most creative chefs agree that working with oil is often more science than art. In the kitchen, it especially applies to oil selection.

Your selection for a given application will be driven by cooking performance, cost, taste and healthfulness. In this article we'll take a look at the various types of oils available, and the characteristics through which each of them creates a niche of their own, and their own special place on the pantry shelves. Particularly if you are a non-chef owner or manager, the more you understand about the cooking process, the better able you will be to have productive discussions with your kitchen crew regarding their craft.