I am always up to try something new, especially if it involves making the food that I cook taste even more delicious. Added healthiness is a bonus, sure, but with something like coconut oil, you get both. In addition to the delicate coconut flavor that coconut oil can add to something like pan-fried plantains or (my personal favorite) a griddled PB&J, it also boasts plenty of health benefits, or at least plenty of food bloggers purport that it does.
As such, when I stumbled upon a bottle of coconut oil that was suitable for more high-temperature cooking, I was pretty stoked. I was a little skeptical that this particular oil, made by Carrington Farms, was liquid at room temperature, and had been “deodorized,” or stripped of all its coconut aroma. Despite these concerns, it was on clearance, so I tossed it into my cart before shoving it into one of the deeper black holes in my pantry.
Until one afternoon, when I was seriously craving homemade French fries. Normally, I wouldn’t make French fries at home — they are messy, and do something terrible to my self-control. Still, this was a craving that could not be cured with any fast-food imitators, so I started peeling and chopping potatoes into perfect fries. When I went to heat the oil in the skillet as the potatoes soaked in their ice bath, I was horrified to find that there was only about a teaspoon left in my bottle of canola oil.
I had almost dumped the entire batch of potatoes into the trash with defeat when I suddenly remembered that bottle of coconut oil tucked into the back of the pantry. After a little fishing around, I found it. The seal was completely intact, and it wasn’t expired. On the bottle, Carrington Farms advertises that their coconut cooking oil has a higher smoke point than olive oil, so I figured that it would be totally fine for a little slow-and-low frying.
I filled the skillet with the coconut oil, set the burner on medium, and walked into the other room to throw on a load of laundry. When I walked back into the kitchen, my stovetop was, well, slightly engulfed in flames. By the time that I’d walked from the entrance to the stove, just a few feet, the fire had extinguished itself, at least momentarily. At first, I was so distracted by the fire that I didn’t even see the waterfall of foamy, hotter-than-hell coconut oil cascading down the sides of the skillet.
For whatever reason, when coconut oil gets too hot, it begins to foam. I had apparently left turned the burner on my crappy, inconsistent apartment range up too high, which caused the coconut oil to heat rapidly. Of course, I was curious about exactly why this happened, so I got to Googling. Unfortunately, Google didn’t really turn up too many answers, other than confirming my assumption that high heat had caused the oil to foam.