The Culinary Aspects of Olive Oil

YESAM hosted Dr. Zeynep Delen Nircan, who  is the founder of Ege’de Atölye and a part-time instructor at Boğaziçi University for a lecture on “Culinary Aspects of Olive Oil.” Dr. Nircan who have done her Ph.D in Organic Chemistry became interested in chemistry of olive and olive oil upon her return home from the United States.

She started her lecture by asking the questions; “Why we cook?” and “why we cook with olive oil?”

“The first reason why we cook is for easier digestion. When vegetables, proteins and starch is cooked the chemical structure of the foods change making it easier for us to digest.  Another reason why we cook is, during the cooking process more flavours come out.  Especially when you cook between 110?C and 150?C a reaction known as Maillard reaction (browning reaction) takes place. In the example of an onion; there are sugars, amino acids and water within onions. When the cooking process starts, these three come together and react, they are broken into a number of smaller molecules. Each of those smaller molecules are the flavour compounds”.

Dr. Nircan continued talking about the specific reasons why we need to cook with olive oil.  First reason is solubility, this is important in order to gain the nutritions from certain plants and vegetables, as they are soluble in oil. Therefore cooking those vegetables in oil will keep the nutritional values in the vegetable. Olive oil also has a high smoke point which makes it suitable for cooking while gaining all the benefits from it.

At the end of the lecture Dr. Nircan showed the audience how to make olive oil lollipops. The participants also had a chance to taste a variety of olive oils produced by NAR Gourmet.

7 April 2016