Any seasoned chef will tell you that having the freshest, most quality ingredients is one of the biggest components to fine cuisine and gourmet food. As a chef, or wanna-be chef, you are pretty much required to know a lot about a lot. Herbs, spices, vegetable types, sugar types, flour types, seafood types, meat choices, fruit choices, and the list goes on of things you’ve got to know a lot about as a chef or gourmet foodie.  With all of the options and knowledge available to us today, it really takes someone with patience, and best of all, experience to know what goes well with what. What other cooks may love in certain dishes, you may loathe.

It’s all about experience when it comes to cooking oils.

When approaching cooking with your oils, you need to go back to the basics, and remember why you are using an oil in your food, and what exactly it’s for. Oils bring a variety of factors to your dish including healthy benefits.  Many oils contain “good fats” which are those you want to cook with. If you are cooking mainly for health, then these are the oils you want to cook with:

• Almond Oil
• Olive Oil
• Sesame Oil
• Flaxseed Oil
• Canola Oil
• Safflower Oil
• Sunflower Oil
• Corn Oil

A few oils that you’d likely want to avoid when cooking primarily for health would be Palm Oil, Palm Kernel Oil, and Coconut Oil. These oils contain a large amount of trans fat, or saturated fats. Coconut oil actually contains more fat than some animal products.

Other Posts You May Find Interesting:

• Getting Creative With Cooking Oils
• Welcome to Cibaria’s Blog!
• Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegars, and Specialty Oils in the New Year
• Community Poll: What is your favorite Cooking Oil?
• Adulterated Olive Oils – Fraud in the Marketplace