Oil for Cooking Thai Curry

Video Transcript

"Hi, Bill Lyons for Expert Village, preparing our quick Thai curry tonight. Now we're going to talk about the oil that we're going to be cooking in. One of the beauties of quick Thai curry is that you're only using a very small amount of oil. It's a very fresh, light meal that we're cooking. So you're just using enough oil on the bottom of the wok, just basically enough to crisp and brown the vegetables and meat products if you're using a meat tonight. There's different kinds of oils that are available. Sesame oil. Really not intended for wok cooking. That's more of a flavoring oil at the end. Olive oil, which a lot of people like to use because it's very heart healthy. It does have a higher smoking point, it's good. The best thing to use though for Thai curries and anything that you're using in a wok is a light oil, like a canola oil or a vegetable oil. These are light. They don't impart any flavor to the food that you're cooking, they have a high smoking point and they cook very quickly and very, very easily. They mix nicely with your vegetables, they don't impart any flavor and they cook well with the foods that you're using. You don't want to use a butter or anything like that. You want to use a nice light flavored oil. Also in the grocery stores now, you can buy wok oils. You have to be careful with the wok oils because very often those will add salt and other unnecessary ingredients. There's enough natural salt in the foods that we're cooking today that you don't need to be adding any extra salt to your meals. So in a minute we'll be back and we'll start talking about the next step in preparing our meal."