I use to work as a short order cook when in High School. One night I had to take some old cooking oil out to the back of the kitchen and dump it in this 55 gallon drum. When I opened up the lid to the drum I was greeted with millions of fly maggots swimming in a drum full of old cooking oil. It's a sight and smell that's hard to forget. So ever since that time I have had this aversion to cooking oil and such.

My neighbor who saves the peanut oil inside his GrandPappy also worked as a cook for a while. So that's probably where he got the idea to save the oil in the GrandPappy with just the lid on.

Just don't let the lid come off and the flies get into the oil. The fly larvae love that stuff.

I won't be able to eat fish or anything else fried in oil for the next 24 hours.

Which reminds me of yesterday's disaster with eggplant. I was going to fry up 3 of my eggplants from my garden and decided to cook them in my new Coleman grill. It's more like a frying pan on top of a grill. So I got the eggplant all oiled up with olive oil. I had this grand idea on cooking the eggplants in hot oil like I do on the stove. This didn't work out very good. First I didn't add any egg batter to the the eggplants nor dip them in cornmeal/flour mix. So they were not breaded. Second the oil soaked into them and make them way too oily. I must have not had the oil hot enough to cook them. I ended up throwing the entire batch out. I fired up the gas grill and sliced up some zucchini and grilled them up. Now that was good. I also picked some fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and had them for dinner with some salad dressing. Ranch cucumber dressing goes well with these vegetables.


Quote Originally Posted by bwframe View Post
No worries Moose.

Your theory about bacteria and toxins is correct, however you'd have to go to the utmost extremes to have a contaminated final product. The indicator of this would be a limp, undercooked, unattractive fillet. If it could be contaminated, it would look and feel bad enough you wouldn't want to eat it anyway.

I was in the the restaurant business for years and literally served tons and tons of fried fish, chicken and other foods. You don't stay in the business long by making people sick. Restaurants filter their oil as necessary, might be daily, weekly etc, depending on volume. They discard their oil only when necessary due to break down or carbonization. Refrigeration of cooking oil or shortening in most cases is not an option.