Sesame Oil
Cooking with Sesame Oil
If you never tried cooking with sesame oil you are in for a surprise. Sesame oil is one of the secret ingredients of Korean, Japanese, and South Indian cuisine being made from sesame seeds. Even though sesame oil has a pretty high smoke point, sesame oil is used frequently to add flavor to dishes rather than being used exclusively for cooking oil. This is primarily due to the fact that sesame oil is one of the most expensive cooking oils because of the manual labor required in harvesting sesame seeds. Due to the fact that sesame oil is Asia’s cooking oil of choice, the demand for sesame seeds remain high around the world.
If you are a novice in cooking with sesame oil, keep in mind that if you are adding flavor to a dish, a small amount goes a long way. For instance, next time you make a fried rice dish try adding about a teaspoon of sesame oil per serving and be amazed at how much better your fried rice smells and tastes. Similar to how families in the Mediterranean love to use olive oil to cook meats and vegetables, Asians love using sesame oil as their cooking oil. Popular Chinese stir-fry dishes involve cooking with sesame oil for enhanced flavor. Korean BBQ uses sesame oil in its marinade for beef short ribs.
Personally, I use sesame oil everywhere. Even if I am pan frying some fish or vegetables, I like to add a couple drops of sesame oil in addition to whatever vegetable oil I am using to really arouse the taste buds. Try it next time, it is guaranteed to be a hit with your guests.
Tips For When You Buy Sesame Oil
Just as how olive oil or canola oil may dominate your local supermarket, sesame oil will dominate the shelves at Asian grocery markets. The key question you want to consider is whether you want roasted or unroasted sesame oil. If you are looking for the sesame oil with the strong flavor that East Asians love, you want to get the roasted sesame oil. Sesame oil produced from roasted sesame seeds have a dark brown color while the unroasted counterpart is pale yellow or golden in hue. Here is a quick guideline to follow:
- If you are making a sauce or creating a salad dressing, buy sesame oil that is unrefined and unroasted.
- If you want to use sesame oil for frying, use refined, unroasted sesame oil as it has a higher smoke point than unrefined.
- If you want to stir fry, created Asian sauces, or just add flavor, you want sesame oil made from roasted seeds.
How Healthy Is Sesame Oil?
Sesame oil has powerful antioxidants that are shown to reduce high blood pressure and maintain good levels of cholesterol. Sesame oil has naturally high polyunsaturated fat which helps in reducing LDL or “bad” cholesterol while increasing HDL or “good” cholesterol levels. Most importantly, sesame oil has strong antioxidants compounds such as sesamin, episesamin, and sesamolin which help the body combat against cell damage.
As for vitamins, a single ounce of sesame oil will give you 75% of your daily Vitamin E allowance. Vitamin E is shown to have positive effects in making your heart stronger by helping prevent cardiac disease as well as combating Alzheimer’s. There have also been studies showing that sesame oil helps reduce stress levels as well as reduce anxiety.
It is no wonder that sesame oil has been used widely in Asia for over thousands of years as the cooking oil of choice.
How Sesame Oil Is Made
As you already deduced, sesame oil is made from sesame seeds. Sesame seeds yield a high level of oil compared to other vegetables producing about 50% of the seed’s weight. Similar with the production of other vegetable oils, sesame seeds are crushed up by rollers to extract oil. For the roasted version, the sesame seeds are first toasted and lightly steamed before being crushed by rollers. These processes produce a sesame paste that is then placed in a wooden press. As the paste is pressed, the sesame oil is produced. Before the sesame oil is bottled, it is either filtered or is allowed to settle before bottling to remove any particulates. Since sesame oil has sesamol, an antioxidant, it is protected from oxidation so the flavor of sesame oil is intact without the need for adding chemicals to this natural oil.