This is mostly for Duffy (and her wolves)… I found this tonight, and thought it might be useful for those home cooks who (like me) lament paying $$ for large quantities of fresh oil every time they deep-fry.
For anyone who’s cooked doughnuts, slightly used oil is actually preferable because it is partially saponified.
Aloha,
Kaleo
I think a strainer with a coffee filter works too
Thought I’d share SE’s oil filter method post from a few months back. http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/06/clean-cooking-oil-with-gelatin-technique.html
This makes sense. Query whether it’s less of a PITA as Kenji suggests.
This. Is. AMAZING. Thank you! I don’t know how I missed it, as I do read Serious Eats quite regularly. I need to get a fridge-friendly container to use for this purpose as my dutch oven is a bit cumbersome, but I am definitely doing this!
Isn’t saponification the chemical process of making soap? If that’s the case, oil is more preferable because it has soap?
Yes, that’s the process. But I would not add soap to oil!
Did you try it? Did it work?
In the last few years, I have used the SE (that is, gelatin) method of cleaning frying oil for re-use. For some reason, YouTube’s algorithm recommended to me another method to clean oil, this time using cornstarch and water. It’s pretty simple. All you do is make a cornstarch slurry and mix it into your cold oil. Heat the oil until the slurry starts to cook and coagulate, then remove the blob, et voila! Clean oil. It works. It is neither more nor less effective than the gelatin method. It is, however, more of a PITA. Separating the blob of coagulant from the cleaned oil is messy. Oily blob, oily mesh strainer, oil everywhere. And trying to contain a blob is much harder than handling a disk of gelatin. Stick with Kenji’s way.
