Olive oil, just as the name sounds, is extracted from the fleshy part of the ripened olive fruit. The colour of the olive oil can vary from region to region depending on a number of factors. From clear yellow to golden, olive oil can truly be an enigma to decipher. If olive oil is extracted from an unripe olive, the oil could also look green. But these are merely some of the facts that you get to know about olive oil. T is important to know how to cook well with the oil in order to derive its true benefits. Read on to know more.
Olive oil might just be one of the most versatile oils that you will ever come across without a doubt. Seldom was there any oil that could even be compared to the wonders and versatility that olive oil offers to its consumers? The one thing that a lot of people do however when cooking with olive oil, is to make a few mistakes that they ought to stop doing in order to ensure that one is able to derive the greatest number of benefits from this miracle oil. So here are a few things to remember when you are using this oil on a daily basis.
Storage:
Ok so you have brought your first bottle of olive oil home and you have finished cooking with it. What follows is you pushing the bottle to the back of the pantry without making sure about how the temperature of that particular location is! Of the many mistakes that people make when it comes to cooking with olive oil, not storing it correctly might just be the most common one! It is of the utmost importance that you store olive oil properly to ensure that the shelf life of your olive oil is a long and healthy one. Seeing as olive oil is one of the best oil for cooking, you need to remember one simple thing; when any kind of olive oil is exposed to even a little amount of heat, it ends up deteriorating over the course of a few months.
What if we told you that olive oil could easily go bad in a few days when it is kept on a window sill where sunlight streams? The same goes for keeping it near an oven. We understand that sometimes it can be hard to find a cool dark place to store your olive oils, especially in the households of a tropical country like India. In such cases, one can always end up buying olive oils that come in tin boxes or dark bottles. However, this is NOT a long-term solution.
You see, the spoilage due to the exposure to sunlight is basically due to the fact that the ultraviolet rays from the sunlight essentially breaks down the composition of the olive oil over an extended amount of time. But the issue does not stop there. Sunlight, apart from making the olive oil go rancid, thanks to the heat exposure, light ends up deteriorating the quality as well as the number of antioxidants present in the olive oil as well. You need to remember to store olive oil at a temperature of 15 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees celsius at most to ensure that the quality of the olive oil is maintained.
Usage quantity:
Though using that expensive bottle of olive oil in generous doses might seem more expensive than you had bargained for, trust us when we tell you that this will only prove to be beneficial for both your health as well as that bottle of olive oil. You see, if you end up using the oil only a few times a month drop by drop, then it might all just prove to be counterproductive to say the least.
Did you know that your olive oil could end up becoming rancid, to say the least, if you end up using it in such little amounts? This is precisely why using the oil generously and not in a miserly fashion will help benefit both you and the bottle itself.
Most of the producers of olive oil will always tell you that it is best to consume an opened bottle of olive oil within a span of 6 weeks or at max, 8 weeks. So when one comes to think about the time that it will take to consume a whole tin or 4L drum of olive oil for cooking, you can look at anywhere from 9 months to even a year. This keeping in mind that you do not use the oil in minute quantities.
You see when you end up opening a bottle of
olive oil. and when it is kept open over a course of time, that it gets exposed
to more and more oxygen over this time period. When it gets exposed to oxygen
frequently, the oil gets oxidized making it lose almost all its flavours in the
long run. This is why it is always advised to buy and use smaller bottles.
However, if you do want to buy a 4L tin try to store it in smaller bottles so
that the exposure to oxygen is limited.
