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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    6 months 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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        6 months 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. The guy who invented modern barbecue ribs was an illiterate slave making food for his owner, where his owner took credit for everything he did. It wasn’

        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.

          • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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            6 months 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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              6 months 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.

              • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                6 months ago

                To this day, there are outdoor kitchens in China.

                Here’s Wang Gang, a world class Chinese chef, cooking literally next to a rice paddy. He normally works in a professional kitchen in Sichuan but for some of his vids he’s at home with his family and they have an outdoor stove setup.

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxpCVrwwF-g

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgYXRuQcniw

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIsLgYy03YM

              • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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                6 months 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

                • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  6 months 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.

                • NewAcctWhoDis [any]@hexbear.net
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                  6 months 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.

              • farting_weedman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                6 months 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.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 months 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

        • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          6 months ago

          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

      • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        6 months 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, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 months 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, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            6 months 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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              6 months 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.

                • loathesome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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                  6 months 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.

  • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 months 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.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 months 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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      6 months 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

    • voight [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      Lmao seed oil discourse is amazing bc these guys are talking like everyone is getting free HRT or they can’t digest protein meanwhile their strongest soldiers are turning beet red and vlogging how they visibly aged themselves a year every month

        • SovietWaveGoddess [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          6 months ago

          And what is the ‘carnivore fad diet’, is that like a new raw meat diet or something? I thought people abandoned that for being obviously horrible for anyone? Raw fish is the only good raw meat.

          I think i’m just out of my depth in this tbh, i have no idea the background of any of this. It sounds extremely online though.

          • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            6 months ago

            the carnivore diet is yeah just people eating solely meat for breakfast lunch and dinner. In its most extreme it’s the Jordan Peterson diet of beef water and salt. Most people allow themselves to eat other types of meat though, and some take it to include all animal products including milk and butter. But honestly most people I’ve seen don’t do raw meat, they literally just buy a ribeye from the grocery store for breakfast lunch and dinner. The most extreme do eat raw meat, organ meats and fermented meats though.

            They push the seed oil thing as part of their effort to convince everyone that plant products are actually killing us and are the cause of all chronic diseases, cancer, heart disease, etc, and we’d all live to 100 and never be sick if we cut out all plant products. There are some very weird claims, like carbs are the reason we sunburn and if you don’t eat carbs you won’t sunburn. Really it’s just terminally online chuds who are still mad about their moms making them eat their veggies when they were 5. Although as someone noted above, there are other fad diets that latch on to the whole seed oil thing, including vegan and vegan compatible fad diets.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    Olive oil has a lower smoke point then other oils and should not be used to deep fry anything. It’s just a waste of good olive oil, even if you deep fry below the smoke point temperature. The actual temperature number doesn’t matter much, it’s just a crude measurement of when the oil starts visibly smoking, and varies between different grades of olive oil, the usage of the oil is what matters.

    • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      smoke point has very little correlation with when the oils start breaking down, which is the thing people are actually worried about. Extra virgin olive oil is one of the most stable oils at high heat despite the lower smoke point. It shouldn’t be used to deep fry anything, but if someone is worried about oil smoke points and carcinogens from eating heated oil, then they really shouldn’t be eating fried food at all in the first place.

        • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          6 months ago

          oh haha ok, nvm, carry on. I guess I’m just primed for seed oil discourse, I don’t know why so many people these days think they’re gonna get cancer if they consume just a drop of oil.

          • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            6 months ago

            This is also in regards to your carnist talking points comment further down, but isn’t this more of a symptom of the 2000’s fad diets?

            I remember “vegetable oil = bad” being as old as Paleo and the guys championing it aren’t vegans but they’re not Liver King type dudes either, meatheads used to make fun of them for eating too many vegetables and it was more about “primal living,” faux-“wellness,” and “detoxing” type shit.

            Jack Dorsey / McConaughey types

            • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              6 months ago

              yeah I do agree the seed oil discourse has a wider audience than purely carnivores. I’ve honestly mostly encountered it from carnivores who use it to promote cooking with butter, lard and tallow, which is where that comment came from. But you’re right, there are a lot of other fad diets that have latched on to the whole seed oil thing, some of which are actually vegan or compatible with veganism.