I wish this was a joke lol it’s all in fun but this is the funniest struggle session of all time.

  • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s so fucking funny because if these people knew as much about culinary as they claim to know, they know there are many dishes that are in fact fried in olive oil. The smoke point discussion is pop science going too far in food. Kenji did an article about this. If these dumbass food nerds spent more time reading and actually cooking rather than arguing with people online, they would know how shit actually performs and how to actually cook. But instead we have a bunch of people who nerded the fuck out when The Menu came out, without realizing that they are Tyler, not the Chef.

    So yeah, fry things in olive oil if you want them to taste like olive oil. Don’t use olive oil if you don’t want it to taste like olive oil shrug-outta-hecks

    Edit: Adding this because I think some of you fuckin libs need a theory lesson

    Mao in Oppose Book Worship

    I. NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK

    Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?

    It won’ t do!

    It won’t do!

    You must investigate!

    You must not talk nonsense!

    III. OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP

    Whatever is written in a book is right — such is still the mentality of culturally backward Chinese peasants. Strangely enough, within the Communist Party there are also people who always say in a discussion, “Show me where it’s written in the book.” When we say that a directive of a higher organ of leadership is correct, that is not just because it comes from “a higher organ of leadership” but because its contents conform with both the objective and subjective circumstances of the struggle and meet its requirements. It is quite wrong to take a formalistic attitude and blindly carry out directives without discussing and examining them in the light of actual conditions simply because they come from a higher organ. It is the mischief done by this formalism which explains why the line and tactics of the Party do not take deeper root among the masses. To carry out a directive of a higher organ blindly, and seemingly without any disagreement, is not really to carry it out but is the most artful way of opposing or sabotaging it.

      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Olive oil being a struggle session is just so frustrating to me. As someone who has a deep love for food and cooking, it hurts quite a bit to see how the internet has pretty much re-birthed cooking snobbery in this entirely new way. I am an exceptionally knowledgeable cook, having worked in a million different types of places and even fully running a place for a little bit, lots of research into food science and such. I like the nerdy side of cooking that the internet has brought out, but the snobbery of olive oil’s smoke point is a great example of when it starts just getting into re-establishing french style elitism based on racism and classism that has kept the true heroes of culinary history out of the public eye. Most of the great dishes we have, some of the smartest food practices around today, were made by illiterate, uneducated slaves and workers, and those people broke a ton of culinary “rules”. Modern internet cooks stand on the shoulders of giants and spit on them.

        One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t. It’s why we see white people essentially try to claim Creole food by making some changes and calling it cajun, and they do it by legitimizing and de-legitimizing certain techniques.

        Or how historically, Central America uses very little oil in their cooking, preferring the flavor of char over a maillard reaction done with oil. Now the delicious food of Central America is being lost over time because cooks are listening to these online people and replacing unique flavor elements from their cultures with french cooking practice. THAT is why white people can’t make tacos, it’s literally because they’re cooking like white people and have had “cook everything in oil” drilled into them from the start of their cooking. It would be one thing if food was just changing with the times, people having different palettes, but that’s not the case, otherwise those gentrified white people taco shops would be a hit amongst Hispanic people.

        I see the whole olive oil debate, and similar discussions as a way to dismiss cooks with unique techniques and their food. People saying you can’t fry in olive oil are implicitly saying that pretty much the entire middle east and medeterranian were just burning absolutely everything they cooked until white people made canola oil. It’s re-establishing elitist cooking standards with bad information. So everybody’s food is becoming more and more tasteless, more Americanized, switching to more neutral oils, all in the name of “not burning” something that isn’t even actually burning. It’s annoying.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          order-of-lenin

          Longtime cook who knows what the hell I’m doing here as well. And you said it perfectly. Having to explain at work that the marinated sundried tomato mix I made for pizzas were supposed to char in the oven just today was a fucking battle. That’s still in the white boy domain, but unless it’s meat doing any kinda charring or searing is just making burnt food to many

          • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I do a lot of foodposting on my account. Like Mao said, talk on things that you’re well educated on and you’ll never make an ass of yourself. Nobody will argue with me over olive oil frying because there’s very little to challenge on well informed takes built from empirically testing books and experiencing things first hand. I’m very well educated on food, and can write at length about history, techniques, and unique flavors I’ve gotten to try.

            • NewAcctWhoDis [any]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Do you happen to know anything about stir frying? I’ve been reading up on it a bit recently and it seems like traditional stir frying would smoke the shit out of the oils available in China at the time.

              • farting_weedman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                hey i went on this journey a few years ago with fuscha dunlops cookbooks as a starting point and eventually machine translated recipies and leylalove is pretty much dead on. a combination of high smoke point oils, doing it fast and doing it outside are how you dont smoke yourself out.

                iirc there’s a section in every grain of rice about stir frying. i’ll see if i can dig it up.

              • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Not as much as I’d like, I will give that as a primer. However, I do know general food history and can extrapolate. So from what I do know, Seasame and Tea Seed oil probably would have been the choices. These have higher smokepoints of 450-500 degrees, if they were cooked outside, smoke wouldn’t have been an issue. Many stir fries are based on SE asian spring veggies, aka when you wouldn’t want a fire running in your house the whole day. We cook inside now, so smoke is way bigger of an issue. Plus, modern Chinese cuisine also creates a shit ton of smoke inside. Fried rice and stir fries requires a smoking hot piece of carbon steel. If it was cold enough to put a fire inside, they probably just made soup from their leftovers instead of a stir fry to avoid the smoke, because nobody wants their house full of smoke.

                So yeah, they were probably creating an obscene amount of smoke and didn’t care because they were outside. Many modern home cooks suggest cooking stir fries using their wok over the grill to avoid the indoor smoke. If they weren’t, it’s because Stir Fry doesn’t necessarily require the super high heat we associate it with

                • NewAcctWhoDis [any]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  So I shouldn’t worry too much about my oil smoking, at least in terms of flavor?

                  Sesame oil is weird because a lot of people insist it shouldn’t be used as a cooking oil but that seems to be completely untrue.

                • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  I thought “real” stir fry required more heat than what a typical western stove can give. I’ve kind of used that as an excuse for my attempts at stir-frys being mid at best.

                  To be fair, the “you can’t stir fry in a western kitchen” is a half-remembered claim from an old book about Chinese cuisine written by an English woman, so I’m not hard to convince otherwise.

        • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t.

          This is basically true for every single thing from foods to animals to plants to insects

          whites renamed them all and paid no attention to the actual native names the people had before

          wikipedia needs to be occupied and completely changed by the JDPON

    • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Guy with a pacojet: Actually, you can tell the difference between vegetable oil blended with corn oil and straight corn oil when you use it to cook deconstructed apple fritters with a miso-chipotle glazesmuglord

      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        God I hate Pacojet people. I have a Pacojet, you know what it’s called? Freezing my robocoupe blade.

        Pacojet texture is pretty fucking cool, it really does get finer than pretty much anything else. However, it’s pretty much a gimmick for anything except for making ice cream.

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I don’t get their problem, as you say, Olive oil makes things taste like olive oil, so use it for things that taste good with olive oil, use a different oil for different things.

      • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        “most of my friends are on there” doesn’t make a platform good, and doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage people from using it. But, aside from that, it’s probably a bad idea to have an account that is connected to real life friends also connected to internet communism.

        • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Makes it good for me and my life. I dont organize on there and dont think people should. And neither are people arguing about olive oil on a gaming discord, whether it happens to be connected to Hexbear or not.

          Also these arent real life friends i dont have those anymore.

          • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Security heads are like the lamest people alive. The gestapo are not going to come for you for shitposting on Hexbear or discord. If they come for you, itll be because you did something that actually threatens power. If you think Hexbear does that, youre a self-important maroon. Hexbear doesnt do organizing. We barely do education.

            Also, discord and hexbear accounts arent linked in any way.

            Discord is the reason Im a real anti imperialist. More than hexbear is i learned shit on Redpixel lol. And i formed a social support network on there that has kept me from offing myself. I dont have irl friends anymore like i said. My discord friends keep me alive after my one remaining irl friend dumped me over a stupid misunderstanding (which admitedly happened on discord, but thats how we kept in touch during the pandemic).

            Its just a comminication platform. And the server system is very useful. Only thing i dont like about it is that helpful information is stored on privatre servers and not searchable online. Death of forums ect ect.

            • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              My main opposition to Discord isn’t really security, but rather that it’s proprietary. I’m a bit extreme when it comes to that, the computer I’m writing this from is literally running linux-libre.

              The OpSec part doesn’t hurt either, but it’s mainly just a way to convince other people to stop using proprietary platforms.

                • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Strange thing to say considering this free website had to be founded after the users were hounded off a proprietary platform for endorsing the killing of slaveowners.

        • voight [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Matrix also lets you actually search all the rooms. Discord’s whole explore feature was repulsive and I avoided eye contact with it the entire time. Almost everything requires a random invite from a dev’s twitter or github

        • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          the issue i remember keep coming up is that there still isn’t an actually good matrix client that approximates discord’s layout. the basic logic of a community being on a “server” with multiple channels people freely swap between , with maybe some voice channels that are compeltely disconnected from the text channels, still isn’t actually implemented because matrix still operates on IRC logic where every single channel is supposed to be a community unto itself. element’s spaces feature is a very poor substitute, and withotu that basic killer feature i don’t see any mass migration happening anytime soon.

          • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            yes but it’s mainly for mods/devs. I don’t think it gets used as a general purpose chat server. I think anyone can request an account but one of the admind has to add you to the channels relevant to you.

  • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I’m gonna throw a completely different take into this struggle session: 菜籽油

    If you can possibly source 菜籽油, a Sichuanese roasted rapeseed oil (not blindly exchangeable with canola, I’ll explain in a bit). It’s versatile enough to be used to make chili oils for hot pots, stir frying AND deep frying.

    It is/was banned in the US and many western countries because a 1960’s study found that if you feed rats 70% of their daily caloric intake in the form of virgin rapeseed oil, they develop heart problems. Also because it’s associated with Indians and Chinese and it was the 1960’s.

    The Canadians found a way to cross breed turnips with rapeseed to produce a legally distinct and “healthier” product, CANadian Oil, Low Acid. This CANOLA oil is cheap but has basically no flavour. But under 2% erucic acid which makes it street legal in the US and other western countries.

    菜籽油, on the other hand, is a mix between native Chinese mustard and European rapeseed. It’s toasted before being pressed for oil, and is a darker, more flavourful oil than canola despite both oils being derived from rapeseed crossbreeds. But it retains high smoke points, can absorb flavours quite well (if you were making a Chinese scallion oil or chili oil, this is a good base, or if you wanted to make some homemade Laoganma, this is good). More recent studies have disproved the link between eucic acid and heart disease, so some online retailers have been able to stock it.

    You don’t need to worry about smoke points and olive oil pricing and whether or not you accidentally gave money to Israel because some of the olives came from a stolen Palestinian olive trees.

    Some form of Brassica oil has been use in India, south east Asia, China and Japan for thousands of years. Pick up a Chinese roasted rapeseed or an Indian mustard seed oil.

  • DengistDonnieDarko [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Had a roommate who tried to deep fry chicken with olive oil. I came home and opened the door and he’s just chilling in the kitchen with a pot on the stove, smoke absolutely billowing out of the pot like a cartoon. Kitchen was greasy for months.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Why does this even matter. Extra virgin olive oil is way too fucking expensive to deep fry with even if I wanted to smoke out my kitchen and eat olive oil flavored chimichangas. Whole debate is bikeshedding for people with nice kitchens in their suburban homes and nothing else to do except pontificate about how seed oils are going to make you trans. Including Kenji, who in a just world would be court-enjoined from publishing links to EVOO deep frying fume analyses until the price falls below $0.30 per fluid ounce. And I thought I was living like a king, upgrading from canola to soybean.

    While I’m at it let me take this moment to further complain about the absolutely piss-poor state of American rental stock kitchens. I have NEVER lived in an apartment that had an actual exhaust venting to building exterior, only those bullshit filters underneath a rangetop microwave. Everything gets coated in gummy dust from the aerosols that are recirculated and you can watch a CO2 meter climb to the maximum reading as the oven warms up. If you want to char anything you need to pull down the smoke detector - god help you in a big apartment building where they’re hardwired and all you can do is poke the button once it’s already started beeping. All of this is academic. Go fry something

    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      You see olive oil frying used for very specific foods, and they make pretty big differences when people actually go for it. I typically fry in peanut or corn oil at home, it’s the cheapest where I live and has the best flavor. However, something like Italian artichoke hearts, or Greek “beneigts” (or whatever they call them) the olive oil is a night and day difference. Idk, it’s a practice more for restaurants than anything. Most people aren’t discerning enough to know when an olive oil fry is worth it, because it is very rare.

      Also, Kenji does food science for restaurants. When we’re talking about frying things and don’t care about creating smoke, it’s because we’re in professional kitchens with good ventilation, and are charging people out the ass for a plate so we have to make sure shit is REALLY good so our restaurants don’t become part of the 90 percent. There is nothing wrong with him answering a question, and dunking on the suburban food snobs you don’t like. It’s not that we should be frying things in olive oil, anybody can tell you that’s too expensive to be worth it. It’s about not deligitimizing cooking processes for a reason that isn’t even true. You have any idea how many times some rich fuck I was a private cook for tried to not pay for their food because “you can’t fry in olive oil because it burns the oil” like they weren’t happily using said “burnt” olive oil to eat 2 loaves of bread. It’s about not letting people be armchair experts on subject matters they don’t understand

    • The_Walkening [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      exactly this - olive oil of any grade is just too expensive to support general deep-frying in full stop, and if the big difference is smoke products making their way into your kitchen, just use veg oil for (most, unless the recipe specifies an oil) deep frying. Even if your fans/filters are good, you’re still dumping a bunch of smoke and polymerized oils into the space between your interior and exterior wall. Congrats, you’ve impregnated your previously fire-resistant gypsum board with flammable oil byproducts and tars for taste, when the end product is 80%+ as good with cheaper, cleaner oil.

      Unless it’s especially good fried in olive oil, cook it in the cheap, use refined frying media because everyone wants the tastes/textures of fried food (crispy, fatty, etc), but the upfront costs for deep-frying are always going to be steep against other preparation methods and gain profitability at volume (i.e. french fries, chip shops). You and your turkey-frying, house-fire-starting setup do not a bespoke chippy make, so don’t aspire to be one.

      I have operated and maintained commercial deep fryers and my experience is that they fucking suck. They require daily maintenance and the maintenance fucking sucks. The products of commerical fryers fucking suck. Yes. All of them absolutely suck. Even your favorite hole-in-the-wall has a garbage deep fryer that’s held together with love, duct tape and Sysco’s boxed bottle of oil de jour. Deep frying is an absolutely mid cooking technique. Fix Your Hearts Unto Mediocrity or Die.

      Deep Frying creates a mid product most of the time, so don’t aspire to excellence. Just aspire to a crispy crust and good browning. Everything else is gravy.

      • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Deep fried turkey is so fucking cursed. The only good thing about it is how flavorful the oil gets for using in other things, but the turkey itself is mid.

        However, I’ve never worked at a restaurant that did olive oil frying that had olive oil in their main fryer. It was always a separate midwalled pan with a spider strainer for specific items. Deep fryers just get way too hot for it to ever be viable, separate from price. As far as price goes though, if you’re at home it really isn’t that bad because you can just re-use the olive oil for everything else. Cross contamination is what makes it so expensive for restaurants. The infused fry oil is pretty damn good for pretty much anything you’d use the olive oil for. I don’t personally use it to fry at home, but I’ve done this at a commercial level before at an EXTREMELY weirdly managed restaurant where I was essentially help for a bunch of disgustingly rich people.

        Arancini and similar dishes are a night and day difference when done in olive oil. However, I’ve only eaten those on my employer’s dime so also get the satisfaction of eating their food. vivian-shrug

        • The_Walkening [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          oh yeah, I haven’t worked at a place that uses olive oil in a deep fryer either- I just worked at a couple of places with deep fryers and they were a pain in the ass, and most of the time, the stuff that came out of it was fair-to-middling. I know an Italian place that does small fried and baked foods (stromboli, arancini, croquettes etc) that I’m sure does all their frying in OO of some kind and it absolutely fucking slaps; but I’m pretty sure all their stuff is extremely small-batch too considering they usually sell out their food by like 12:30 every day.