Interestingly enough, soybean oil is virtually non-existent over here in Germany - at least not as oil that you can buy (here the dominant ones are canola, good ol' sunflower and olive - the latter not for frying though), and I also haven't heard of it as an ingredient in industrial foods, but I wouldn't vouch for that.
Yes. As I mentioned above -- soybean doesn't grow well in most of Europe (certainly not in the UK), canola grows very easily. Also soya is one of the 14 notifiable allergens in Europe, which makes it almost unsaleable in its unrefined form. Unusual to find it outside of specialist asian food stores.
In the UK, "vegetable oil" is almost always canola.
Even sunflower oil will be marketed as such because it's more expensive (imported from Germany, Ukraine, Albania I imagine). And I imagine it'll only get more expensive because of the situation.
It's not a common oil you find on the shelves of a grocery store, even in the US.
It is, however, a prominent ingredient in a lot of bottled sauces and dressings. You can find it on the ingredients list of most salad dressing and sauces.
It's a very German thing to not use olive oil for frying. It took me by surprise when living abroad, and to realise it's a common frying oil in Mediterranean countries but also in the UK.
Economics, probably -- sunflowers and canola grow more easily.
Olive oil is a nice pan-frying oil, it's what I use.
Linguistic thing:
When Americans talk about oil for frying, in my experience, they are a fair bit more likely than us to specifically mean deep frying, for which olive oil is no use. Way more of a deep-frying culture, from several different influences.
American cooks are slightly more likely (than the Brits at least) to use the term "broiling" for shallow/pan-frying. Unusual word here.
“Broiling” would refer to using the broiler on one’s oven, I’ve never heard that term used to describe pan-frying. Terms I have heard are sautéed and seared
As another aside, deep fat frying is quite uncommon in homes in the UK now.
Many people under the age of say 25 will never have eaten deep-fried food cooked at home.
There was quite a concerted campaign against it in the early 80s because so many house fires and serious injuries were caused by either unsafe fryers or unsafe technique. Safety campaigns, TV ads, fire brigade campaigns, a campaign to get people to fit extractor hoods and smoke detectors etc. Coincided with a public health campaign aimed at getting us
to lower our fat intake, about deep fried food, full fat milk etc.; government "nudge unit" stuff.
Time was, deep fried food was a staple of cheap home cooking; nowadays a deep fat fryer is really an enthusiast cook's appliance, in white British homes at least.
> use the term "broiling" for shallow/pan-frying. Unusual word here.
I don't think that's right; it's more used for what you do in the oven under the "broil" setting.
Americans use "saute" and "fry" in somewhat context dependent , somewhat interchangeable ways. Along with "sear" being somewhat specific to browning at high heat.
I was aware that "broiling" was a cooking method, but I have no concept of what it involves. After checking a dictionary, I still don't -- wikipedia redirects "broiling" to "grilling", and Merriam-Webster defines "broil" as "to cook by direct exposure to radiant heat: grill", with an example given of "broil the steak in the oven". I would be more likely to use "bake" for heating something in an oven, though I'm uneasy about applying "bake" to a steak; I'd probably just say "cook the steak in the oven".
I would use "fry" for cooking something in oil; I would not personally use "sauté" at all.
I note further that neither Merriam-Webster nor wikipedia seems to be aware of a distinction between grilling and baking, or at least not one they're willing to articulate. I would have said that baking involves being cooked within an oven and grilling involves being cooked on top of a hot surface.
Grilling is _under_ a hot surface. Like broiling. But when you broil you use a different pan. Or something.
Now if you want a really weird distinction: baking and roasting. Same appliance, much more similar temperatures than you might think, often only subtly different prep.
You might think, no, you "bake" things that rise or are transformed by the process, like dough. But you might also "bake" potatoes and fish. Or you might say that roasting involves oil and basting, but you might baste baked fish. Or roasting involves an open dish or tray. But often so does baking.
In this case it really is a kind of convention in English, in the same way that adjective order force is a convention.
We generally consistently use one word for a given application or a given origin of the food.
You mean grilling of the kind that is also done _outdoors_ there. Heating on wire above fire.
Like the Aussies we call it "barbecuing". They do it all the time; here it is understandably done very infrequently, and is generally known to reliably summon rain.
In a British kitchen, certainly domestically, what is called "grilling" does involve cooking on a wire grill, but invariably under a radiating heat element positioned above the food. In, like, 100% of cases.
With my gas cooker it's a separate (eye level) set of gas jets. In an electric cooker it's either a specific element mounted on the roof of the smaller top oven, or it's a use of only one of the two or more elements in that oven. But the grill is always above.
If we cook food in its own juices on an heated flat surface indoors, that would be a "griddle" or a "hot plate" -- that's what the commercial burger cooking machinery is called.
Essentially nobody has that equipment inside their homes; safety standards would tend not to allow it.
This is one of those things that shows that no nation owns the meaning of a word.
> If we cook food in its own juices on an heated flat surface indoors, that would be a "griddle" or a "hot plate" -- that's what the commercial burger cooking machinery is called.
To me a hot plate is a (small, portable) substitute for a stove, rather than being the device you use to cook the food, which would rest on top of the stove or hot plate. They are best known for being something college students can smuggle into dorm rooms.
I occasionally visit a fondue restaurant which offers, among other options, a "grill" for the meat course, and the grill is a griddle (a lightly curved slab of iron rested on a heat source) with no cover.
You also make me curious what you think of the George Foreman Grill, which as I understand it is a ridged, hinged, self-heating griddle that you fold around whatever hopefully-flat thing you want to grill. Almost exactly the same as a waffle iron, except it's a "grill" instead.
Anyway, outdoor grilling is certainly a part of American culture, but the American concept of a "grill" is not restricted to that, and clearly includes cooking on a griddle.
(To your earlier point, I tend to agree that there are many words that basically just mean "cook", and the particular word used is determined by convention according to the object being cooked. Bread is baked; beef is not baked, even if what you do to the beef is identical to what you do to the bread.)
> To me a hot plate is a (small, portable) substitute for a stove
Also that here too (or the plate of an old-style metal electric cooker). Portable hot plates are a thing again here but were out of favour for a good while, again due to electrical safety standards.
> You also make me curious what you think of the George Foreman Grill, which as I understand it is a ridged, hinged, self-heating griddle that you fold around whatever hopefully-flat thing you want to grill. Almost exactly the same as a waffle iron, except it's a "grill" instead.
I think in Europe and the UK we were kind of confused that the George Foreman Grill was such a big deal; we've had press-type grills like that over a long period, particularly as panini presses. But they've always been used to cook things like bacon. What makes the George Foreman Grill good is the quality of its construction.
When I was a student we relied on a toasted sandwich maker; like a smaller panini press, a bit like a waffle iron except designed to enclose, seal and cook a filling -- cheese and tomato, tuna etc. -- between two slices of bread. Genius invention but capable of heating cheese beyond what is allowed by physics. You definitely could cook other things in a toasted sandwich maker if you were OK with them coming out triangle-shaped.
This is making me hungry (and homesick for my vintage gas cooker, since where I am staying has a decidedly unimpressive early 90s electric cooker)
> (To your earlier point, I tend to agree that there are many words that basically just mean "cook", and the particular word used is determined by convention according to the object being cooked. Bread is baked; beef is not baked, even if what you do to the beef is identical to what you do to the bread.)
Right. It also occured to me last night that there are heritage/legacy aspects. e.g. perhaps "roasting" comes from cooking over open fire on a stick; we just now do it in an oven.
Oh, I agree lots of American's don't use the word broil; I was (obviously not clearly) trying to say that those who do use it probably use it because there oven has a setting marked "broil". For ovens that have that, it usually means heat only using the top element (and sometimes only full blast), so the heat is only coming from above.
I think fry is more often used than saute, and often context dependent (e.g. fried chicken may imply deep fried, fried onions doesn't) This latter may be regional.
Exactly, I was wondering why none of the comments were talking about sunflower oil, which is what I used in my whole life along with olive oil. Vegetable oil does exist in Germany, I think it is sold as pflanzenöl, although I just don’t use it.
