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

[frigg.livejournal.com]

I really don't want to be a party-pooper, but palm oil production has huge environmental issues. I have to admit that I've boycott it completely and always read product ingredient lists in the supermarket to avoid it. :)

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

So do I, but I suspect that there'll be artisanally produced fair trade palm oils out there somewhere (although I admit I've yet to find a source).

Being a Yourpeen, I'm lucky to live close to a number of countries producing artisanal olive oils.

[frigg.livejournal.com]

*nods*

There seems to be issues even with the sustainable palm oil, which I haven't come across either btw.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Another issue is displacement of indigenous populations. This has been a problem in Indonesia, particularly (at least, that's where I come across news of it). There are boycotts of particular brands and support of companies that behave in a better way (kind of like with coffee, only more so).

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I would never, ever buy a product with the name Nestlé attached!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Being European, you can be more pleased about your agricultural policy than I can, as an American. As an American, I'm plenty aware of agribusiness's abuses in my own country. Lots of climate-change-hastening, environmentally destructive, unsustainable behavior going on right in my own country, so while I don't condone what goes on in palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia, there are LOTS of problems that I could/should be addressing in my own country simultaneously, or first. Casting the beam out of my own eye, and all that.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Yeah- at least we've managed to maintain a ban on GMO's and that's largely down to public pressure- it's a real vote loser.

Organics are popular and they have a sale.

It's not really rocket science.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yep, I do know all about the environmental issues, and I'm not intending to make it a major part of my diet. There are sustainably produced palm oil, though: I found this page (http://www.evolvingwellness.com/essay/guide-to-red-palm-oil-health-nutrition-sustainability-brands), which lists several.

The sort I bought doesn't claim to be sustainably produced, so it probably isn't, but it's from Ghana, which as I was saying to cmcmck in my other entry about it, isn't like Indonesia or Malaysia with huge mega-plantations (also, the oil palm is native to western Africa, which maybe makes it a little less bad there--though huge plantations of just one type of crop are always bad news).

[frigg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Ghana produced oil is maybe less controversial than South-East Asian produced oil.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

The only commercially produced food oil here in the UK is rapeseed oil which can mean attractive bright yellow fields of that particular brassica in springtime (amazing if it's being organically grown and there are poppies :o)

http://yorkshire-photography-workshops.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MS38828.jpg

but at least it doesn't do the environmental harm that commercial palm oil does.

[frigg.livejournal.com]

We produce rapeseed oil as well here in Denmark, it does make for beautiful fields, although I've yet to see one with a lot of poppies in it. :)

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

The fields that have the amazing bursts of colour are not being sprayed and are being grown organically.

When an organic field is allowed to lie fallow for a year, you get this:

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSCesRa6uiFuY_Kkf0fexuXiIW9uqi1K2Ke1QXD0bbY_7C62XsLRA

[frigg.livejournal.com]

I have a wild field and there is an organic farmer further down the road, but we rarely have such beautiful fields. I mostly get grasses, dandelions, and thistles with the occasional daisy (although I did have a single poppy one year) - probably because I'm just mowing it and not removing plant material. The farmer had a rather pretty field full of cow vetch and a few daisies last year. It attracted loads of butterflies. :)

Seems like I need to come to the UK for the really gorgeous fallow fields. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that is very pretty!