What oil is recommended for
cooking and eating?
I
wish I could give an easy, definitive answer, but the truth is that I am as
confused as anyone else by the claims made for different types of oil. Every
type of oil or fat seems to have the ideal combination of healthful properties,
suitability for cooking and taste — if you listen to the people selling it. And
then they tell you why every other type is wrong. The result is that you end up
confused about every type and since there are so many, from animal derived ones
like butter, ghee and lard, or seed oils like mustard, canola (the nicer name
for rapeseed), safflower and cottonseed, or nut oils like coconut and walnut,
or fruit oils like olive and palm, or even more like corn, rice bran and soy,
it makes for a lot of confusion.
This is an
age-old confusion. Edible oils are possibly the first commodity made and traded
by human beings in any significant way. The reason for this is simple: they are
messy and hard to make at home. People might grow their own vegetables,
slaughter their own animals, even grind their own flour, but other than making
ghee from cream skimmed from milk, it is just too much of a problem to make
oils at home.
Specialised oil mills were needed and people to run them, and these oil pressers would start
to barter and trade the oil they produced. KT Achaya, known for his general works on Indian food history, has also written a fascinating specialised volume on ghanis, the traditional oil mills of India, in which he points out that the development of oil mills marked a crucial stage in the development of settled human communities. Trial and error determined which oils were stable enough to stand up to long stored and sealed pots or amphorae devised for this. And in time trading systems developed for oils — and with it came competing claims for different types.
Readers will say all this is all very well, but stop ducking behind history and answer a simple question: which oil do you use most often at home? And I would have to answer that, while I keep a range of fats and oils for different uses (olive oil for salads, chicken fat for soups, ghee for some dal tadkas, mustard oil for Bengali food, coconut oil for some Malayali food), the oil I use most often and for most general purposes is sesame. Til ka tel, or gingelly oil, to use the South Indian term, which has been crushed in a traditional ghani is the oil which I personally feel offers the best all round package.
It is the oil with the oldest Indian roots. Ancient pastoralists probably made butter, and from that ghee, and may have rendered other animal fats, but sesame oil starts with the earliest substantial settlements in the subcontinent. "A mass of charred sesame seeds was excavated from the ruins of Harappa", writes Achaya, and these have been dated to at least 2000 BCE. From around five centuries later, at the time of the Rig Veda, there is mention of both sesame and ghanis, though not together — sesame seeds are used in sweet offerings and ghanis for crushing the mysterious soma juice. At some point they were put together since the later Atharva Veda mentions sesame oil, and by the time of Kautilya's Arthashastra of around 300 BCE there is specific mention of a guild of oil pressers.
All this places the origins of sesame in North India, but it rapidly spread from there in all directions, to Mesopotamia, China and Africa (and later the Americas, probably taken by slaves). Sesame oil is, in fact, perhaps the most widely consumed oil across ancient history. The plants grow without problems in most warm climates and even in fairly poor soils. The seeds crush easily and cleanly, not clogging up or wearing out oil mills as some other oil sources can do. It is also the most stable of oils, thanks to two natural preservatives it contains called sesamol and sesamin. This is why it is the favoured oil for making pickles for long storage.
It is hardly surprising that sesame has picked up a lot of religious and ritual connotations. In India the seeds form one of the basic offerings in funeral ceremonies, but also have less dismal uses like the til sweets eaten around Makar Sankranti. But unlike ghee, whose ritual significance (and high cost) can constrain its regular use, sesame oil was commonly and widely used for cooking. Other vegetable oils tend to be regionrestricted, like mustard oil in the North and East, coconut oil in the South and groundnut oil in the West, but sesame oil is used everywhere.
It helps that it is relatively, though not entirely, neutral tasting. Much as I like mustard and coconut oils and find them a must for certain recipes, at times they can be too dominating. Ghani pressed sesame oil isn't like that, but it isn't as boringly bland as the many refined oils. Sesame oil has a delicate nutty aroma and a faint and pleasing earthy taste. This can increase dramatically if the seeds are toasted before pressing, as is done in the Far East. Sesame oil from there is really a flavouring, to be sprinkled on rice or at the end of a stir fry, for a strong nutty kick. It is a promise of what sesame can do, but doesn't need to, mostly keeping its power politely in check.
I don't want to play sesame against olive oil. I like them both, and through the Middle East both are used side by side. As far back as 1876 an India Office report notes how sesame oil was being exported to Europe to be passed off as olive oil, though this presumably stopped when it was discovered that sesame oil could be easily detected using the Baudoin chemical test. Really good quality olive oil has a slight acidity which gives it a better taste profile when eaten raw, but when it comes to cooking, sesame oil will always have the edge in India simply for reasons of cost.
Yet despite its long history in India, in recent years I have found sesame oil oddly absent from shop shelves. You can find it if you look, but you do have to look — it is crowded out by all the many other oils. The problem with sesame really lies at the crop end. Sesame seed pods are prone to shattering when ripe and scattering the seed, so it needs care in harvesting. The commercial oil industry doesn't have time for this, when it can harvest crops like soy or corn on a huge scale and process them for oil using almost entirely mechanical means. And since these producers are the ones with the ad budgets and retail clout, they are sidelining the essentially small-scale sesame oil.
Mahatma Gandhi lived long before such mass market oils really became big, but he saw it happening — and advocated sesame oil as an alternative. "We have suffered the village oilman to be driven to extinction and we eat adulterated oils," he wrote presciently in 1935, and he was an enthusiastic supporter of Jhaverbhai P Patel, who was trying to develop ghanis that were more efficient, though still suitable for village-level production. The model he devised is called the Wardha ghani after Gandhi's last ashram and it is still in use, though with modifications. This includes electric power, which Gandhi might not have liked, but this does save on animal labour (and not just animal - humans have had to turn ghanis too, like Veer Savarkar in prison in the Andamans).
A lot of sesame oil production still happens in such small ghanis and one of the attractions of using them is appreciating the differences you find. As Achaya describes it, grinding sesame is complex, containing many variables like whether the seeds are husked or not, the speed with which they are ground and the crucial point when water is added to float out the oil. I have enjoyed many different types of ghani til ka tel, from the dramatically dark and deep tasting oil I found in the weekly organic stall run by PB Murali in Chennai, to lighter oils from brands like Down To Earth in Rajasthan.
But the sesame oil I use most often is bought in a bookshop. The Gandhi Book Centre near Grant Road station is an admirable institution dedicated to ensuring cheap and universal access to Gandhi's works. It is right next to Bhaji Gully where you get some of the best vegetables in Mumbai, and it stocks til ka tel from a traditional ghani at the Yusuf Meherally Centre in Raigad District. The quality is excellent, the price is not high, it supports a good cause and I can buy both books and vegetables at the same time — surely it's easy to understand why this is my standard cooking oil! VIKRAM DOCTOR CDET131129
Specialised oil mills were needed and people to run them, and these oil pressers would start
to barter and trade the oil they produced. KT Achaya, known for his general works on Indian food history, has also written a fascinating specialised volume on ghanis, the traditional oil mills of India, in which he points out that the development of oil mills marked a crucial stage in the development of settled human communities. Trial and error determined which oils were stable enough to stand up to long stored and sealed pots or amphorae devised for this. And in time trading systems developed for oils — and with it came competing claims for different types.
Readers will say all this is all very well, but stop ducking behind history and answer a simple question: which oil do you use most often at home? And I would have to answer that, while I keep a range of fats and oils for different uses (olive oil for salads, chicken fat for soups, ghee for some dal tadkas, mustard oil for Bengali food, coconut oil for some Malayali food), the oil I use most often and for most general purposes is sesame. Til ka tel, or gingelly oil, to use the South Indian term, which has been crushed in a traditional ghani is the oil which I personally feel offers the best all round package.
It is the oil with the oldest Indian roots. Ancient pastoralists probably made butter, and from that ghee, and may have rendered other animal fats, but sesame oil starts with the earliest substantial settlements in the subcontinent. "A mass of charred sesame seeds was excavated from the ruins of Harappa", writes Achaya, and these have been dated to at least 2000 BCE. From around five centuries later, at the time of the Rig Veda, there is mention of both sesame and ghanis, though not together — sesame seeds are used in sweet offerings and ghanis for crushing the mysterious soma juice. At some point they were put together since the later Atharva Veda mentions sesame oil, and by the time of Kautilya's Arthashastra of around 300 BCE there is specific mention of a guild of oil pressers.
All this places the origins of sesame in North India, but it rapidly spread from there in all directions, to Mesopotamia, China and Africa (and later the Americas, probably taken by slaves). Sesame oil is, in fact, perhaps the most widely consumed oil across ancient history. The plants grow without problems in most warm climates and even in fairly poor soils. The seeds crush easily and cleanly, not clogging up or wearing out oil mills as some other oil sources can do. It is also the most stable of oils, thanks to two natural preservatives it contains called sesamol and sesamin. This is why it is the favoured oil for making pickles for long storage.
It is hardly surprising that sesame has picked up a lot of religious and ritual connotations. In India the seeds form one of the basic offerings in funeral ceremonies, but also have less dismal uses like the til sweets eaten around Makar Sankranti. But unlike ghee, whose ritual significance (and high cost) can constrain its regular use, sesame oil was commonly and widely used for cooking. Other vegetable oils tend to be regionrestricted, like mustard oil in the North and East, coconut oil in the South and groundnut oil in the West, but sesame oil is used everywhere.
It helps that it is relatively, though not entirely, neutral tasting. Much as I like mustard and coconut oils and find them a must for certain recipes, at times they can be too dominating. Ghani pressed sesame oil isn't like that, but it isn't as boringly bland as the many refined oils. Sesame oil has a delicate nutty aroma and a faint and pleasing earthy taste. This can increase dramatically if the seeds are toasted before pressing, as is done in the Far East. Sesame oil from there is really a flavouring, to be sprinkled on rice or at the end of a stir fry, for a strong nutty kick. It is a promise of what sesame can do, but doesn't need to, mostly keeping its power politely in check.
I don't want to play sesame against olive oil. I like them both, and through the Middle East both are used side by side. As far back as 1876 an India Office report notes how sesame oil was being exported to Europe to be passed off as olive oil, though this presumably stopped when it was discovered that sesame oil could be easily detected using the Baudoin chemical test. Really good quality olive oil has a slight acidity which gives it a better taste profile when eaten raw, but when it comes to cooking, sesame oil will always have the edge in India simply for reasons of cost.
Yet despite its long history in India, in recent years I have found sesame oil oddly absent from shop shelves. You can find it if you look, but you do have to look — it is crowded out by all the many other oils. The problem with sesame really lies at the crop end. Sesame seed pods are prone to shattering when ripe and scattering the seed, so it needs care in harvesting. The commercial oil industry doesn't have time for this, when it can harvest crops like soy or corn on a huge scale and process them for oil using almost entirely mechanical means. And since these producers are the ones with the ad budgets and retail clout, they are sidelining the essentially small-scale sesame oil.
Mahatma Gandhi lived long before such mass market oils really became big, but he saw it happening — and advocated sesame oil as an alternative. "We have suffered the village oilman to be driven to extinction and we eat adulterated oils," he wrote presciently in 1935, and he was an enthusiastic supporter of Jhaverbhai P Patel, who was trying to develop ghanis that were more efficient, though still suitable for village-level production. The model he devised is called the Wardha ghani after Gandhi's last ashram and it is still in use, though with modifications. This includes electric power, which Gandhi might not have liked, but this does save on animal labour (and not just animal - humans have had to turn ghanis too, like Veer Savarkar in prison in the Andamans).
A lot of sesame oil production still happens in such small ghanis and one of the attractions of using them is appreciating the differences you find. As Achaya describes it, grinding sesame is complex, containing many variables like whether the seeds are husked or not, the speed with which they are ground and the crucial point when water is added to float out the oil. I have enjoyed many different types of ghani til ka tel, from the dramatically dark and deep tasting oil I found in the weekly organic stall run by PB Murali in Chennai, to lighter oils from brands like Down To Earth in Rajasthan.
But the sesame oil I use most often is bought in a bookshop. The Gandhi Book Centre near Grant Road station is an admirable institution dedicated to ensuring cheap and universal access to Gandhi's works. It is right next to Bhaji Gully where you get some of the best vegetables in Mumbai, and it stocks til ka tel from a traditional ghani at the Yusuf Meherally Centre in Raigad District. The quality is excellent, the price is not high, it supports a good cause and I can buy both books and vegetables at the same time — surely it's easy to understand why this is my standard cooking oil! VIKRAM DOCTOR CDET131129
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