Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half-Hour)

Ask Me Anything (Office Half-Hour)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half-Hour)

This event was on Tuesday, April 29, 2025 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

Can you go over the difference with olive oil and vegetable oil when using to cook vegetables sparingly?

— Randi Lempert

Answer:

Yeah, so the main difference between both of those is olive oil is specifically pressed out of olives. Uh, vegetable oil can be used from a lot of different things. Um, a lot of times it's, uh, you know, out of a certain seed pressed out of it, but, uh, the biggest difference you're gonna see here is, um, the temperature that you can cook with them all. Uh, olive oil has a much lower heat ratio than a vegetable oil does, typically now that vegetable oil is also a general term, right? So there could be oils within vegetable oil that don't have a high heat, uh, tempering. So you definitely wanna watch out for that. I typically use an avocado oil if I'm going to be cooking with oil as well. It does have a higher heat index, which is great. Uh, it doesn't have a huge amount of flavor for it. If I'm going to be using olive oil, it's typically at the end of cooking a dish that I'm going to be using an olive oil just because, um, most people like fl the flavor of olive oil and that flavor tends to cook off when you're actually cooking with it. So if you add a little bit at the end of it, you'll actually get the flavor of olive oil versus actually what you're trying to u usually people are using the oils as a non-stick kind of a surface as well too. So, um, biggest difference that I can tell you is one is a very specific kind of an oil. One is a general term, but basic difference is one is a lower heat index and one has a higher heat index.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com