Baking with extra virgin olive oil?

A good extra virgin olive oil is used for dipping bread, dressing a salad or giving your grilled vegetables the finishing touch. As long as you absolutely don’t bake with it, right?

Olive oil is said to make your food bitter, and because of its relatively low smoke point, baking with it would supposedly be unhealthy too. Sunflower oil is therefore usually the recommendation. At Serious Eats, they investigated this question, and what do you know? You can simply bake with olive oil!

Not unhealthy

First of all, there was no evidence anywhere that heated olive oil is bad for your health, or that its health benefits decrease when heated. Good news, then, but of course we’re mainly interested in the flavor. This was tested in three ways: deep-frying and two different preparations in a pan. For the meat cooked in the pan, a rich, fatty pan sauce and a lighter one were made to see how the olive oil affected the flavor of the dish. In all the tests, extra virgin olive oil was compared with sunflower oil.

Deep-frying

For the deep-frying test, artichokes were fried in the oil. The test panel ultimately found the artichokes fried in olive oil even tastier than those fried in neutral sunflower oil, because the olive oil adds a rich flavor. That flavor may not be desirable when frying doughnuts or tempura, but with somewhat more Mediterranean dishes, it can provide that little bit extra.

Baking

Then there was the baking: no difference in flavor was detected here, either with the rich or the lighter pan sauce. Nothing bitter or too strong-tasting, just as delicious as when you cook your meat in sunflower oil. The only reason we can think of not to bake with extra virgin olive oil is the price. It still feels like a waste to pour a few generous splashes of olive oil into the pan when you paid €17 for half a liter or took the last bottle from that sweet little lady in Italy. If you can’t taste the difference anyway, we are just as happy to use sunflower oil. But if you have nothing else at home, baking with olive oil really won’t do any harm.