The best oil to use when frying fish

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. Do you discuss the new episode of Game of Thrones even though you know one of the group hasn’t watched it yet but you have some really good things to say about the plotline? Aside from high moral questions such as these there are also the decisions you have to make about every day about your health. There is so much information out there that it is easy to become paralysed as to how much exercise you should do, when you should do it, what you should eat, and what you should eat it with. At least a new study has provided some certainty by showing how you should fry your fish.

In the new study researchers shallow fried two types of fish in two types of oil at 170 degrees Celsius. The fish used was European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) and gilt-head seabream (Sparus aurata) . The two oils used were extra virgin olive oil and sunflower oil.

There is so much information out there that it is easy to become paralysed as to how much exercise you should do, when you should do it, what you should eat, and what you should eat it with.

Analysis revealed firstly that both cooking oils became richer in omega-3 oils after the cooking showing that oils had moved out of the fish during frying. Conversely, the fish also became higher in fatty acids from the oil in which they were cooked (oleic acid from the olive oil and linoleic acid from the sunflower oil).

In addition to the migration fats the researchers also measured the formation of oxidation products in the oils due the relatively high temperatures used. They found that in the pan sunflower oil did form aldehydes which can be potentially toxic whereas these compounds were not formed when olive oil was used.

It also emerged that fat absorption was different between the seabream and the seabass. So while the exact results of cooking in oil will be different according to the species of fish you use, the reduction in oxidation compounds means that extra virgin olive oil is your best option for some moderate temperature shallow frying.

All this of course, is presuming you want to fry your fish when a simple fillet baked with lemon juice and a tad of butter is a perfectly viable option.