The taste of palm oil

[asakiyume]

Sesame oil, peanut oil, olive oil--they have really distinctive tastes. Sesame oil really tastes like sesame, and peanut oil has a peanut taste, and olive oil doesn't taste like pickled olives, or brined olives, but it tastes the rich and fragrant way it smells.

Palm oil has a really distinctive taste too. When I tasted Flo's Nigerian fried beans, cooked in plenty of palm oil, it was the first time in a long time that I tasted something so completely *new* and *different*.


Nigerian fried beans from All Nigerian Recipes

Palm oil has, to me, a green taste ( which is funny since it's bright red), green and deeply warm. It tastes the way leaves baking under the midday sun smell--and mix that smell with the smell of hot, warm earth--that dusty warm smell. That's how it tastes to me. And it has a lingering feel in the mouth, the way peanut butter does--but not quite that sticky.


Do I like it? At first it nonplussed me a little because the flavor was so unlike other oil flavors I've experienced, but I enjoyed it. And today, going back for leftovers, I felt less tentative, more enthusiastic. Tastes: BROADENED.

Here is an oil palm plantation (photo from Azran Jaffar's article on a prizewinning smallholder's plantation)



Apparently there are two types of oil to be had from the oil palm. Red palm oil, the kind I used, comes from the fruit. A golden oil comes from the kernel.
Photo source here

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

And fried bananas as well? Oh, this is too much! (anguished flail of envy)
It's breakfast time here, and that all looks and sounds wonderful!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So what delicious thing did you end up eating for breakfast? And where you are, do you cook for yourself, or does someone cook for you, or do you buy in prepared food, or....?

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

This morning, leftover banana curry, and yes, cooked by me. :)

But many, many mornings we buy banh mi trung from a woman down the lane, who cooks it and sells it on her front step. (It tastes great, but translates as an unexciting soft-omelette-in-a-roll, with other bits in it, like chilli,and grated vegetable pickle.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Both the banana curry and the banh mi trung sound *delicious*. Now I want to make them.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Ditto this! Yum, yum, yum