Yes, you can sauté with olive oil - what Big Seed doesn't want you to know

The smoke point myth that keeps you from enjoying your olive oil to the fullest. 

Somewhere along the way, home cooks in America were told not to cook with extra virgin olive oil. "Too delicate," they said. "Low smoke point." "Use it for dressings and drizzling." "Too expensive for cooking!" So when it comes to heat on a pan, reach for something else like canola oil, safflower oil, vegetable oil or even avocado oil...

Meanwhile, in Sicily, people have been frying, sautéing, roasting and braising in olive oil for roughly three thousand years.

Let's look at the science that supports the Sicilian approach to olive oil. 

Where the myth came from

The "don't cook with olive oil" advice emerged in the 1960s-70s alongside the rise of industrial seed oils such as soybean, corn, canola and sunflower. These new oils needed a selling point, and they found one: smoke point. The claim was simple: a higher smoke point means better for cooking. Seed oils have higher smoke points than olive oil. Therefore, cook with seed oils.

It sounds logical. It is also incomplete to the point of being misleading. Smoke point tells you when an oil starts to visibly smoke. It tells you nothing about what is actually happening inside the oil. Specifically, whether harmful compounds are forming.

Every oil has its own smoke point. The beauty of olive oil is you don't need to go there to create great flavors. 

What actually matters: oxidative stability

The real measure of a cooking oil's safety is oxidative stability. What this means is how well it resists breaking down under heat, oxygen and the passage of time. By this measure, extra virgin olive oil is not fragile. It is among the most stable cooking oils available. Pegaso EVOO, for example, can last 2 years from when it is opened if stored correctly.

Two reasons. First, olive oil is roughly 70 to 80 percent oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat with a single chemical bond that resists oxidation well. Seed oils like canola and grapeseed are 50 to 70% polyunsaturated fats, which have multiple bonds and break down much more easily under heat. Second, extra virgin olive oil is full of natural antioxidants (polyphenols and vitamin E) that actively protect the oil from oxidation during cooking. Refined oils have had these stripped out in processing.

A 2018 study tested multiple oils at high heat and found that extra virgin olive oil produced far fewer harmful compounds than canola, sunflower and grapeseed oils, despite having a lower smoke point than all of them. Another study found that EVOO remained stable after 36 hours of continuous deep-frying at 180°C. Corn oil, with its higher smoke point, produced twice the harmful compounds at the same temperature. The seed oil lobby would prefer you didn't know this.

What the smoke point of EVOO actually is

A high-quality extra virgin olive oil has a smoke point between 374 and 410°F. Sautéing typically happens between 320 and 375°F (i.e., medium to medium high heat). Roasting in a home oven at 400°F rarely gets the food itself above 300°F, because moisture in food keeps its temperature well below the ambient heat. For the vast majority of home cooking, you are nowhere near the smoke point of a good EVOO. If your olive oil is smoking, your pan is too hot. That would be true of any oil.

If you're cooking with olive oil and it's smoking and clearly burning, you should discard it and start over. Just like any other oil or food!

The flavor argument

Beyond safety, there is taste. Canola oil is neutral by design. It contributes nothing to the food it cooks. Olive oil is flavor, it is more substantial, and that flavor doesn't disappear when you heat it. It transfers into the food. Onions softened slowly in good olive oil taste different from onions softened in a neutral oil. Vegetables roasted in EVOO come out with a depth that the same vegetables in canola simply don't have. So that is a consideration beyond the overheating issue.

Sicilian cooking has always understood that olive oil is not just the medium. It is an ingredient.

So cook with it. Sauté your onions in it. Roast your vegetables in it. Fry your eggs in it — generously, the way they do in Sicily, so the edges crisp and bubble and the whole thing tastes like somewhere specific and good. Your best olive oil deserves to actually be used.