"cooking oil" news and stories

Way before it's time to peel back the skins from the mushy goodness of steaming, roasted squash, the first step is removing those slimy seeds and, if you're a good recycler, dumping them in a compost bin. But to Greg Woodworth, saving those seeds is step one in producing a deep amber-colored, aromatically nutty, squash seed oil, a no-waste answer to upstate New York's abundant fall crop and an American alternative to olive oil.

Once a cookie factory in Boston, Woodworth's now repurposed, renamed, relocated Stony Brook WholeHeartedFoods in Geneva, NY -- co-owned with partner Kelly Coughlin, a public health advocate for water quality -- bottles 20 cases of spent seed oil each week from acorn, delicata, butternut and buttercup squash (and soon, pumpkin) to be shipped to culinary boutique shops, restaurants and grocery stores across the country, like Formaggio Kitchen in Boston and even Whole Foods Market in Dedham, Mass. and Portland, Maine.

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Baked Alaska isn't as fancy-pants as it might seem, even though it's being served at the Governors Ball.
• Marcela Valladolid, star of the Food Network's Mexican Made Easy, wants you to give chilaquiles a screen test.
• Wolfgang, Alton and Lidia are tapped to host the culinary Oscars.
• What is your headlining cooking oil?
• Do you have a D-list herb?
• The home-cooking big wigs at "America's Test Kitchen" get set to release a video-game adaptation.
• The sidecar is a sparkling marquee cocktail.

...Well, almost. The corporation has officially switched all of its cooking oils to trans-fat free in its U.S. and Canadian restaurants, but many of the premade products - like pies and cookies - still contain the artery-clogging ingredient.

You probably remember hearing about this - or even thinking it had already happened- because Mickie D's announced the plan awhile ago. In fact, while they were drumming up press, Wendy's, KFC and Taco Bell all made the switch to trans fat-free cooking oil.

So, thanks, McD's. Now Americans and Canadians have another way to rationalize our insane consumption of fried foods.

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The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is mounting a campaign to educate Britons about "hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods" to give people some perspective on the foods that they are putting into their bodies and to try to encourage healthy eating habits. Their focus, for the moment, is on crisps. A survey done by the BHF revealed that 49% of children from 8-15 ate at least one package of chips (crisps) each day, and 20% ate two or more. They are consuming roughly 5-liters of cooking oil every year at that rate, or about 1 1/3 gallons.

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

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Robert Tomey, a McDonald's franchisee owner, has put his leftover french fry grease to a good use: fueling his car. His stores, he says, produce about 10,000 gallons of excess oil each year and, after having a simple conversion performed on his car, he now has more than enough to get wherever he's going. In fact, Tomey says that 20-30 cars could be powered by that amount of oil. The grease is processed in a way similar to regular diesel fuel.

And Tomey is not the only one who does this. His conversion kit was purchased at Grease Car. Their conversion kits can cost up to approximately $2,000 and their emissions statistics are intended to provide potential consumers with an idea of how they'll be helping the environment if they convert a diesel car to run on vegetable oil. There seem to be many people who have successfully converted their cars, so it is possible we may see even more of them in the future, especially if McDonald's began to recommend this as an option to their franchisees, since it does seem like a great use for leftover grease.

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