Which Olive Oil Should You Cook With?

Most RealPlate recipes use olive oil. It's simple, reliable, and works for almost everything.

That's partly practical and partly habit. My partner is Italian, and staying with her family I saw how naturally they reach for olive oil in everyday cooking – it stuck.

It's a good everyday choice on health grounds too: it's high in monounsaturated fat, which makes it a better default than cooking mostly with butter or other saturated fats.

We use extra virgin olive oil by default. It adds flavour and works well for dressings, roasting, pasta and most pan-frying. It's worth saying that extra virgin is a perfectly good cooking oil – the idea that it can't take heat is overstated, and it handles a hot oven or a normal frying pan without trouble.

Light olive oil (sometimes called pure or refined) has a milder flavour and takes a higher temperature before it starts to smoke. It's the one to reach for when you don't want to taste the oil at all, or when the pan is genuinely fierce – a smoking wok, say. It's still made from olives, just refined.

One thing worth clearing up: "light" refers to the flavour, not the calories. It has the same energy as any other oil.

Here's a simple way to think about it:

Olive oil is easy to cook with, easy to find, and doesn't take much thought once you're used to it.

In RealPlate, extra virgin is the default and does the roasting and frying in most of the library. We only call for light olive oil in a handful of recipes – the stir fry, the karahi, the fajitas, the jerk chicken and the chickpea curry – where the pan gets very hot or a fruity oil would sit oddly with the spicing.

It's a small detail, but one of the things that makes the food feel right.