Don’t Sacrifice Your Food Quality to Save on Oil

Is it worth compromising the taste of your food?

Much like the quality of your menu is the lifeblood of your restaurant, the freshness of your fryer oil is vital to how your food tastes. The more times oil is used, it eventually begins to take on a fishy smell. This is due to the oxidation of linolenic acid, a common fatty acid in oils. Each time the same batch of oil is used to fry, the more compounds breakdown within it, eventually leading to it emitting a foul odor. That rancid smell will eventually seep into the food and the taste is adversely affected. How? Like any other living or once living organism, the food you’re frying is partly comprised of water, and the fact that oil and water don’t mix because of their respective chemical makeups is what allows this process to work. But the more oil is used, and the more those compounds break down, the less hydrophobic the oil becomes. As oil becomes less water-resistant, it will more rapidly soak into your food, changing its taste and causing it to be unappetizingly greasy.

Food color and texture will change

In addition to potentially altering the way your food tastes, using the same frying oil too long can also affect the color and texture of your food. When using spent oil, those crispy golden French fries you and your customers are accustomed to will become soggy while eventually taking on a browner, less appetizing color. Remember, one of the first things that occurs when you drop food into a fryer is the water inside the food escaping the hot oil. You’ll see this in the form of bubbles rising to the surface. In a healthy frying process, as the food dehydrates and the water exits, the hydrophobic oil tends to spread where the water isn’t. But if you’re using spent oil that is less hydrophobic, the oil will emerge into the food even with water still present, hence the sogginess. This process begins on the surface of the food, so naturally, the exterior layer of the food will begin to take on the color of the oil. The more spent the oil, the darker it is and eventually the darker and less appealing your food will look.

More frequent filtering

Each time you fry food in a batch of oil, food particles accumulate at the bottom of the storage container, and sometimes even stick inside the increasingly viscous oil. The more often you use the same frying oil, the more often you are going to have to filter your fryer because the of the increased number of particles that build up in the spent oil. This takes time and is not worth the hassle. It is much more prudent to frequently change your oil on a regular schedule to prevent food particles from building up that can both potentially mix in with your food and force you to filter your fryer at a higher frequency.

How to know if your oil is spent:

Different businesses use different types of oil. That, coupled with frying temperature and frying frequency are all factors in to how long one batch of oil remains fresh. While there is no uniform method to how often you should change your oil, there are signs to look out for to see if it is deteriorating in quality.

• Spent oil tends to have thick, gummy consistency and sometimes soapy appearance to accompany that unpleasant smell.
• Cooking oil’s color is often an indicator of its freshness because it darkens the more times it is used.
• Beyond these basic tests that involve the senses, test kits are a useful tool for determining how fresh the oil is.

It’s understandable to want to get the most out of your frying oil inventory when prices are high, but in the end, your business’s core products will suffer. It’s not worth jeopardizing the color and quality of your food. Continue to change your oil regularly and your kitchen will benefit in the long run.

5/14/2021