The food lab better home cooking through science ( PDFDrive ) 1068

“vegetable” oil (usually a mix of soybean and corn oil), grapeseed oil, and bacon fat I immediately noticed a direct correlation between the level of saturated fat in a given cooking medium and how crisp the chicken got Chicken cooked in highly saturated lard (40 percent saturated fat), shortening (31 percent), bacon fat (40 percent), or palm oil (81 percent) was by far the crunchiest This seems like a good thing—until you actually let it cool a bit and eat it Because those fats are all close to solid at body temperature, they leave your mouth with an unappetizing waxy coating With lighter foods like tempura-style vegetables or fish, this coating is especially noticeable On the opposite end of the spectrum, chicken fried in highly unsaturated fats like grapeseed (10–12 percent saturated fat), olive (13 percent), corn (13 percent), sunflower (10 percent), avocado (12 percent), or vegetable (around 13 percent) oil suffered from the opposite problem: the chicken simply didn’t crisp up as well The winner? Peanut oil, with its moderately high level of saturated fat (17 percent) and clean, neutral flavor The chicken fried up clean and crisp, without any of the mouth-coating waxiness of the highly saturated fats It’s my fat of choice for almost all frying projects, not just chicken SATURATED VERSUS UNSATURATED FAT W e hear the terms “saturated fat” and “unsaturated fat” thrown about often, but what they really mean, and how they affect your cooking? Like most organic compounds, fats are pretty complicated molecules They’re naturally kinked and wound up, but if you were to straighten one out, it would resemble the letter E, with a molecule of glycerol forming the spine and long chains of carbon atoms called “fatty acids” forming the three arms It’s the exact makeup of these arms that determines whether or not a fat is saturated A carbon atom can form four bonds with other atoms In saturated fats, every carbon atom in the chain is bonded to two hydrogen atoms, along with the carbon atom preceding it and following it.† In unsaturated fats, one or more of the carbon atoms is bound only to a single hydrogen In place of the missing hydrogen, it forms a double bond with a neighboring carbon atom Monounsaturated fats contain a single double-carbon bond, while polyunsaturated fats contain two or more doublecarbon bonds  ... called “fatty acids” forming the three arms It’s the exact makeup of these arms that determines whether or not a fat is saturated A carbon atom can form four bonds with other atoms In saturated fats,...W e hear the terms “saturated fat” and “unsaturated fat” thrown about often, but what they really mean, and how they affect your cooking? Like most organic compounds,... complicated molecules They’re naturally kinked and wound up, but if you were to straighten one out, it would resemble the letter E, with a molecule of glycerol forming the spine and long chains of carbon