For the love of coconut, but mostly the oil

When there are eight different kinds of coconut oil on the shelves at Target in Torrington, you know something is up. Forgive me for not remembering all the different variations but they were basically refined or unrefined, organic or not. This is just in the cooking department, by the way; I believe there are even more coconut oil products in the beauty department.

It doesn’t seem so very long ago that all tropical oils were considered to be heart-stopping artery-cloggers. I remember people refusing to eat popcorn at the movies because the kernels were cooked in them. 

I don’t know about palm oil and other tropicals but coconut oil seems to have rehabilitated itself and now it has a reputation as a miracle substance that makes your skin more beautiful, boosts your healthy HDL cholesterol and even helps cure AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, acne and thyroid imbalances.

The American medical establishment is still pretty skeptical, and we are reminded by the American Heart Association that even if coconut oil increases your good cholesterol, it also increases your bad cholesterol. Coconut oil is about 90 percent saturated fat; that’s more than butter (64 percent saturated fat), beef (40 percent) and lard (also 40 percent).

It also has a lot of calories.

The Harvard Health newsletter is fairly polite about coconut oil and says it tastes good and is probably fine to eat in small doses. Many cooks are using it now because it is solid at room temperature and can be a good substitute for vegetable oil shortening and for butter in baking.

The Pritikin Longevity Center in Miami, Fla., takes a much harder line and says, “Don’t believe claims on the Internet and elsewhere that coconut oil is good for you. Coconut oil is bad news for your LDL cholesterol, heart and overall health.”

Some companies are selling “virgin” coconut oil that hasn’t been hydrogenated, claiming that it is the hydrogenation that makes the coconut oil unhealthy. Pritikin disagrees, saying that the hydrogenation only impacts about 8 percent of the oil, so that it doesn’t really make a difference. If you’re going to buy coconut oil, Pritikin says, don’t bother getting the virgin oil because it’s more expensive and not actually any better for you.

Harvard Health says that even if you use coconut oil from time to time, you’re better off sticking with olive and soybean oils, which not only increase your good HDL cholesterol, they also lower your bad LDL cholesterol.

While I have higher cholesterol than I ought to have, I’m not at the point yet where my doctor is worrying about it. And I wouldn’t say I’m especially worried about my weight. My daughter is also super skinny, so for our household a little bit of coconut oil didn’t seem like too much of a dangerous gamble. 

So I bought some. 

The jar I got at Target is a brand called Simply Balanced and it is described as organic refined coconut oil, expeller pressed, medium-high heat. I don’t know what any of that means, but the jar explains that this particular oil is good for “sauteeing or stir-frying vegetables, chicken, beef or fish over medium-high heat.”

I can also use it for baking cakes, cookies and pie crusts and I don’t have to refrigerate it but  should store it in a cool dry place. 

When I took the jar off the shelf, the oil was a white solid. By the time I got it home, on an 80-plus-degree day, it had become a lemon-colored liquid, and it’s pretty much stayed that way all week (it’s been hot out).

The jar promises that there is no coconut flavor in this oil, although I wouldn’t completely mind if my crust had a soupcon of  coconunt taste. 

I used the oil to sautee some chicken. Coconut oil is supposed to have a high “smoke” point; I haven’t found this to be particularly true, it definitely starts to smoke when the heat is over a medium-to-high flame. It doesn’t seem to burn at high heat, though, the way that my canola oil does. 

Saturday morning, for example, I put some canola oil in a skillet and turned the heat to medium, to make crepes for my daughter. The smell turned nasty pretty quickly and the room got smokey. 

I then tried the coconut oil. It still smoked, but it smelled better. My daughter reported that there was no coconut taste in the finished crepes (and no burned-oil flavor).

Sunday afternoon I tried making a pie crust with coconut oil instead of vegetable shortening. As a general rule, I am more inclined to make pate brisee than pie crust because it’s easier to work with, but there’s no shortening in pate brisee, just butter. 

For my pie crust recipe, I turned to Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa. It was very easy to work with and rolled out and baked just like a shortening and butter crust. The one suggestion I would make is that you let the coconut oil get to room temperature, measure it and then refrigerate it. It’s challenging to measure it when it’s hardened and in the jar.

I learned another trick from the New York Times on Sunday: If you’re using a glass or ceramic pie plate, preheat a metal cookie sheet in the oven and put your pie plate on it (if you’ve got a fruit filling, be sure to line the sheet with parchment paper).

The end result was, in fact, one of the best pie crusts I’ve ever made. It was buttery in flavor, and had a nice crisp texture. 

Coconut oil pie crust

Adapted from Ina Garten at www.foodnetwork.com

Makes two 10-inch pie crusts

1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) of very cold unsalted butter, 1/3 cup coconut oil, 3 cups of all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon of kosher salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar,   about a half cup of ice water.

Preparing to make a pie crust takes longer than making a pie crust. The first thing you want to do is measure out your coconut oil while it’s in its liquid form and then refrigerate it until it turns solid (this can take a few hours; I wasn’t kidding about the preparation time).

The next thing you want to do is cut up your cold butter and put it back in the refrigerator (or even the freezer, if it’s an 80-degree day and you don’t have air conditioning in the kitchen).

Pour a little more than a half cup of water into a measuring cup, add a couple ice cubes and put the whole thing in the refrigerator.

Measure your flour, salt and sugar into the bowl of your food processor and pulse it a few times to mix everything up.  

Add the butter and solid coconut oil to the flour mixture and pulse it eight to 12 times. The fats are supposed to mix with the dry ingredients and, after a dozen or fewer pulses, they should look like peas. This never happens for me, which probably means I overmix it (the cardinal sin of crust making). Err on the side of fewer pulses if you aren’t sure. 

After your eight-or-so pulses,  get your ice water and pour out about a half cup through the tube of the food processor while the machine is running. It’s OK if the ice gets in there; the blade will crush it up pretty fast.

Again, just run it for the absolute minimum amount of time you need to get the water in there and lightly mix it with the flour.

Turn the machine off. Dust some flour on a board or your counter (yes, it’s going to be messy). Dump the dough out onto the board. It should be crumbly and should be slightly resentful of your efforts to form it into a ball — but it should obey and allow you to coagulate it into a mass (if it doesn’t, wet your hands — but again, don’t touch it any more than you absolutely have to).

Divide it into two balls and wrap each one tightly in plastic wrap. Put the balls in the refrigerator for at least an hour, preferably more, so the gluten in the flour can recover from being handled so much. 

When it’s time to bake an actual pie, take the time and temperature from whatever recipe you’re using. 

I don’t like rolling out my dough on a floured board, because it toughens it. I recommend rolling it out between two sheets of plastic wrap.