Earthy Cooking

African Chicken & Greens in Palm Oil

More and more, people are starting to see the value in using unrefined oils — they’re far better for your health (if properly stored and handled), they’re usually better for the environment and the people who produce them (who are often small-scale farmers and producers rather than corporate conglomerates), and they retain much more of their distinctive flavors and scents, which in turn makes them a lot more fun to cook with.  (If you shut your eyes and take a big whiff of unrefined peanut oil, you’d swear you were standing inside a jar of peanut butter.)

So, it’s no longer terribly uncommon to find a jar of unrefined coconut oil or of unrefined sesame … or even unrefined macadamia nut oil.  But an oil that is still stubbornly on the sidelines is red palm oil, a traditional African oil that’s been used for culinary, cosmetic, and curative purposes for thousands of years.  (White palm oil, on the other hand, has been used in Western food manufacturing for decades.  It’s a refined version of red palm oil wherein the flavor, color, and many of the nutrients have been stripped out.  Still, though, thanks to its high content of saturated fat and therefore high resistance to oxidation, white palm oil is a better choice than most refined vegetable oils.)

I think the main reason that the red palm oil just hasn’t caught on is its very unusual and very strong flavor — there’s a reason why I titled this post “Earthy Cooking.”  While that earthy taste goes well with typical African ingredients — hearty greens, beefy squashes, and chicken meat from chickens who have probably been hunting and pecking all day and thus offer much stronger-tasting meat than their pallid, overbreasted American counterparts — red palm oil provides much more flavor than any other oil I’ve come across.  Thanks to its amazingly-high amount of beta carotene (which your body uses to make vitamin A), it’s also an intriguing shade of red.  It’s also quite oily in the sense that you’ll have to wipe your pans out with a paper towel before washing them.  (I’m guessing that the “oiler” feel of red palm is due to the fact that it’s also chock-full of vitamin E.)

As I said, however, red palm oil is a wonderful culinary base for African dishes (check out Marcus Samuelsson’s Soul of a New Cuisine for plenty of red palm inspiration), and it certainly has a lot to offer in terms of nutrition.  It also has just enough saturated fat to be shelf-stable and suitable for cooking, yet just enough monounsaturated fat to be a thick liquid at room temperature.  (Coconut oil tips more in the direction of saturated fat and is therefore solid up to temperatures of about 77 degrees F.)

If you’re curious about red palm oil, it’s well worth checking out — just be advised that you’ll never have tasted anything like it.  White palm oil, on the other hand, is virtually tasteless and is sold in tubs.  It’s generally meant to be used for frying or baking purposes … although coconut oil can be used the same way and has more flavor to offer.

I say, be brave and go for the unrefined red palm oil — the Jungle Products brand even includes a handy recipe right on the jar!