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.
After a little digging, I was able to discern that the water that leached from the potatoes during the cooking process was interacting with the oil and causing it to foam. It probably didn’t help that these potatoes has soaked in ice water for a half-hour — a requirement for optimum crispness. Even though I’d dried them thoroughly, they were still turgid from their shock-soak, and as they released water from their little potato cells, it proceeded to fuck up my entire day.
Fortunately, I use an electric range, or my entire apartment building probably would have whooshed up in flames. I turned off the burner, removed the skillet, and wiped away some of the oil on the surface. After allowing it to cool, I went back to finish the cleaning job, only to realize that the oil had seeped into every possible surface of the stovetop. Under each burner, in between the drip trays, and worst of all, into the oven itself.
After a couple of hours of cleaning, I just decided that I wasn’t going to be able to use this damn stove again. Take-out forever it is. Of course, that isn’t feasible, so I spent another couple of hours trying to sop up the twenty ounces of oil that contaminated, by this point, every surface in my entire kitchen. After plenty of 409 and elbow grease, the stove was probably cleaner than it ever had been.
Still, for weeks, every time I turned on the stove or oven, the smell of heating (or burning, depending on the temperature) oil filled the house. Fortunately, it was coconut oil, so it wasn’t really all that bad. It took months for all of that oil that had seeped into the nooks and crannies of the stove to finally cook away. I’m sure when the next tenants in that apartment stepped into their new place, though, it still had a slight coconutty odor. Perhaps they should’ve charged them extra for that.
It also took months for me to start trusting coconut oil again. Since this fiasco, I’ve avoided any kind of coconut oil in its unnatural form, or anything that isn’t solid at room temperature. When I use coconut oil in simple sautes or when baking, I’m glad that I didn’t discard it from my cooking repertoire altogether. But if I had, could you have blamed me? It almost burned down my kitchen!
Amy McCarthy is Paste’s Assistant Food Editor. She’s still pretty mad at coconut oil.
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