[Sca-cooks] OOP - Green Beans with Garlrc Sauce

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Phlip:
>Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...
>
>>  Doesn't it make everything taste like peanut, though? I can see that
>>  being okay in dishes that also contain peanuts, or pb, but the one time
>>  I used peanut oil in something, the flavor was really obvious.....
>>  --Maire, who has (rustle, rustle, clank) Canola, 2 kinds of olive,
>>  toasted sesame, almond, and [hidden in back] walnut oil
>
>Not really, any more than generic vegetable oil tastes like generic
>vegetables ;-) There is a slight back taste, but if you use the Planter's
>oil, it's so light as to be almost non-existant- a strong flavor in your
>dish, and it pretty well vanishes. While no oil is totally neutral flavored,
>it's about as neutral as you get.

I'll go with this, up to a point. I have never yet encountered an oil
that had no distinctive flavor of its own (well, maybe mineral oil,
and generic vegetable oil, maybe sunflower or safflower oils come
pretty close). I think the greatest canard is the claim that corn oil
is a neutral flavor, but then they say similar things about corn
syrup, too.

Peanut oil does usually taste like peanuts, but at least peanuts are
eaten in the South of China (and, I assume, grown there), and I
guess, apart from its value as an unsaturated fat with a high smoke
point, it's not necessarily an incompatible flavor to a lot of
southern Chinese stir-fried dishes, any more than olive oil poses a
distracting element in a good ragu.

Adamantius