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by oven9342 837 days ago
Olive oil is great for cooking as long as you keep it below its temperature, 170 degrees celsius. I use a fancy IR thermometer because I'm a nerd.

"during frying olive oil behavior is usually equal or superior to that of refined vegetable oils" https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1541-433...

"olive oil, independently of its category label, is clearly resistant to degradation under domestic frying conditions (170 °C). Among the olive oil categories, the extra-virgin PDO olive oil was more resistant under the conditions of this study" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...

1 comments

> I use a fancy IR thermometer

This is useless for taking absolute measurements like 170C. You have to calibrate the oil/pan's emissivity using a normal thermometer

That depends on how fancy the IR thermometer is.

A simpler thermometer may have a single IR receiver. In that case its output can be far from truth without an emissivity calibration.

Better IR thermometers have 2 or more IR receivers for different wavelengths and they compute the temperature based on the ratios between them.

In this case the measured temperature no longer depends on the value of the emissivity, but only on the deviation from the behavior of a gray body. With an increased number of IR wavelengths that are measured, it becomes less likely that a calibration could change the results, but cheap thermometers are unlikely to use such a sophisticated method.