No Seed Oils: What We Cook With and Why

Three restaurants, no seed oils. Beef tallow in the fryers, avocado oil in the marinades, California olive oil in the hummus and the dressings. Here is what that costs and why we do it.

What we actually use

Most restaurant kitchens run on one oil. It goes in the fryer, in the marinade, on the flat top, and into the dressing, because a single high-volume commodity oil is cheap and simple to manage. Usually that oil is soybean, canola, or a blended vegetable oil.

We run three fats, each chosen for a specific job.

Every fried item we serve comes out of natural beef tallow. Every hummus we make — all eight flavors — is built from the same Original base, and that base contains olive oil. Because every flavored hummus starts from that base, there is California olive oil in every single one.

The honest version of the seed oil argument

Seed oils have become a loud topic, and a lot of what gets said about them online outruns the evidence. We are a restaurant, not a research institute, and we are not going to tell you that soybean oil is poison. Plenty of careful people disagree about the health effects, and the science on industrial seed oils and human health is genuinely unsettled.

What we can speak to is cooking, and there the case is more concrete.

The reason we fry in tallow is stability. A fryer holds oil at temperature for hours and reuses it across a shift. Fats high in polyunsaturated fatty acids break down faster under that kind of sustained heat and oxygen exposure than fats high in saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids. Beef tallow is largely saturated and monounsaturated, so it holds up. It also tastes better. Anyone who ate fast food fries before the industry switched away from tallow in the 1990s already knows this.

The reason we use olive oil in the hummus and the dressings has nothing to do with heat. It is that olive oil tastes like something. In a dish with five ingredients, a neutral oil is a wasted opportunity. Extra virgin olive oil brings fruitiness, bitterness, and a peppery finish, which are the attributes professional tasting panels actively score as positive.^[1]

And there is a reasonable body of evidence behind olive oil specifically. It runs 70 to 80 percent oleic acid and carries phenolic compounds at 50 to 800 milligrams per kilogram.^[2] In the PREDIMED trial, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil was associated with a stroke hazard ratio of 0.60 against the control diet.^[2] That is a stronger evidence base than most things a restaurant puts on a menu board.

The smoke point objection

The most common pushback on cooking with olive oil is that it cannot take heat. It is largely a myth built on a misunderstanding.

Olive oil's smoke point ranges up to 470°F depending on grade, with extra virgin typically between 350°F and 410°F and refined olive oil between 390°F and 470°F.^[3] Average stovetop cooking happens around 350°F.^[3] Most home cooking is comfortably inside the range.

More importantly, smoke point turns out to be a poor predictor of how an oil actually performs under heat. Comparative testing of common cooking oils found extra virgin olive oil to be the most stable, because oxidative stability depends more on fatty acid profile and antioxidant content than on the temperature at which an oil begins to smoke.^[3] Oils with much higher smoke points degraded faster.

That said, we do not deep-fry in olive oil, and we would not suggest you do either. It is expensive, and the aromatic compounds you paid for are destroyed by sustained high heat. Use olive oil where you can taste it. That is the whole logic of running three fats instead of one.

What it costs

We are not going to pretend this is free.

Grass-fed beef tallow costs multiples of what commodity fryer oil costs. Avocado oil is more expensive than soybean oil. Real extra virgin olive oil in the quantities a hummus program requires is a genuine line item — and unlike the other two, it goes into a product we give away by the bowl.

Running three fats also complicates the kitchen. Three products to order, three to store, three to train around, and three chances for someone to reach for the wrong one on a busy Friday. A single-oil kitchen is simpler in every operational respect.

We do it because we think the food is better, and because after seventeen years the fryer flavor and the hummus flavor are part of what people are actually coming in for. Those are not things we can change without changing the restaurant.

How to do the same thing at home

You do not need to overhaul your kitchen. Match the fat to the job.

For high-heat searing and frying, use a stable fat — beef tallow, ghee, or avocado oil. For roasting and sautéing, olive oil is fine and better tasting; our piece on olive oil for roasting vegetables covers the temperature question in detail. For anything uncooked — dressings, dips, finishing, bread — use the best extra virgin olive oil you are willing to buy, because that is where you will taste the difference and nowhere else.

The single highest-value swap for most people is the last one. Replacing the oil in your salad dressing costs almost nothing per serving and changes the food noticeably. Our guide to making vinaigrette is a reasonable place to start.

The oil we use is the oil we sell

We did not develop a product line and then find a use for it. We bought this oil for our restaurants for years, then bottled the one we were already using.

It is pressed in California by a family-run grower and miller in business since 1998, from an organic orchard in the Santa Ynez Valley. The unflavored bottle is certified extra virgin. Our two infused oils — Garlic and Rosemary Garlic — are built on a base of extra virgin and virgin olive oil, which is a deliberate choice we explain in what extra virgin actually means.

You can find all of it in the olive oil collection, or taste it first at any of our three restaurants. The hummus on your table is made with it.

References

[1] "Extra Virgin Olive Oil." Olive Oil Times.

[2] Riolo R, et al. "Olive Oil in the Mediterranean Diet and Its Biochemical and Molecular Effects on Cardiovascular Health." Int J Mol Sci, 2022.

[3] "Olive Oil Smoke Point." North American Olive Oil Association.