Should I eat this? Deep fried edition.

May 25, 2021 1:21 PM

I have a 1/2 gallon of veg oil in a deep cast iron pan on the side burner of my grill in which I cooked a piece of cod. Afterwards I left it out uncovered by accident for a day and found 2 deceased flies in it. Scoop out flies and fry or dispose of oil? (Already made my choice but interested in what others would do).
posted by Fortnight Bender to Food & Drink (31 answers total)

Sorry, the flies make it a no-go.
posted by praemunire at 1:27 PM on May 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

I would probably toss - I don't think there's any particular danger but oil is cheap and flies are gross.
posted by mskyle at 1:27 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Flies? Flies actually walk on poo. Give it the old heave-ho.
posted by holborne at 1:32 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Technically, I think you can keep it, but I'm on team toss it. Flies are gross, and I can afford a new bottle of oil. I have several containers with reused frying oil next to my stovetop (different oils for Spanish tortillas, Asian deep fries, European deep fries), I absolutely reuse the oil several times. But no flies.
posted by mumimor at 1:33 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'll go against the grain! You could fry up flies, or salmon, or salmon-illa, and the oil would kill all those nasty germs! What are the flies going to drop that can live through 600* oil?

She's fine! A lot of restaurant oil baths have seen a WHOLE LOT worse than a fly or two!
posted by bbqturtle at 1:35 PM on May 25, 2021 [25 favorites]

Another option would be to clarify the oil to remove the non-oil stuff in it, be it fly ridealong particles, cod batter residue, or what-have-you. You can mechanically filter it, but gelatin filtration is more effective and way more mad science-y (without being too involved or fiddly).
posted by lhputtgrass at 1:40 PM on May 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

Already made my choice but interested in what others would do

Like, personally? I'd probably use it. I'm gross, though.
posted by geegollygosh at 1:40 PM on May 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'd use it. I'm not squeamish about this kind of stuff.
posted by JD Sockinger at 1:45 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

This sounds like a Ren and Stimpy close-up shot man. Like you wouldn't die but come on
posted by katiec at 1:47 PM on May 25, 2021 [9 favorites]

Or Invader Zim.
posted by praemunire at 1:48 PM on May 25, 2021

Right, this is not a safety issue but a squeamish/ick factor psychological issue. And so of course people are all over the board. Hell, many MeFites seem to believe food turns to poison after an hour or two on the counter.

There is no potential for harm here, assuming you reach common/safe deep frying temperatures. There's also no harm in licking a glass dildo you find on the street, after it's been cleaned and autoclaved.

I would use the oil but probably skip the dildo.
posted by SaltySalticid at 1:49 PM on May 25, 2021 [25 favorites]

If you think flies (and rodents and other insects) haven't touched a lot of the food you eat, you really don't want to know what the food supply chain is like...
posted by Candleman at 1:51 PM on May 25, 2021 [14 favorites]

If anything, your cooking oil now tastes of fish and dead flies, safety aside. Dispose of it, sheesh.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:51 PM on May 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

Technically, filter it with cheesecloth and save it for another day, since the heat of frying will kill any bugs that may be present (though I don't really know what "dead poo" is).

Humanly, oil is cheap. Toss.
posted by rhizome at 1:55 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Please specify species. Drosophila melanogaster [fruitfly] = fine. Schistocerca gregaria [desert locust] = not so much, unless John the Baptist.
FDA rules allow: average of 30 or more insect fragments per 10 grams for Allspice, ground. and on and on.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:55 PM on May 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

Meh, I'm a forager. I pick bugs outta my food all the time. I'd use it. My main thing is about bacteria, and the heat takes care of that.
posted by RedEmma at 2:11 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'd toss it, but because of the cod/fishiness, not the flies or time sitting out.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:21 PM on May 25, 2021 [5 favorites]

Well, I forage too, but I am also a dog owner. I clean what I find, throughly.

But this fly in oil thing is all about irrational feelings. I stated above that I would toss the oil, which is the plain truth 90% of the time. BUT, if I had run out of cooking oil and was craving spring rolls, I would filter the oil and use it. There is a hierarchy of irrational priorities and immediate access to crisp vegetable spring rolls can rate higher in that hierarchy than worries about dead insects, sometimes.

I think They sucked his brains out! and A Terrible Llama have a good angle, though. Fish-smelling cooking oil is not good.
posted by mumimor at 2:23 PM on May 25, 2021

If you found dead flies in your fruit salad, would you pick them out and eat it? Same answer here. It’s not the germs ON the flies that I object to, it’s their dead bloated fly-juice-leaking bodies swimming in the food.
posted by HotToddy at 2:27 PM on May 25, 2021

I would tell my partner he could go ahead and cook for us with it, but to give it a little time so I forget, and to please pretend he threw it out.
posted by aniola at 2:29 PM on May 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

... that would address my squeam, and the bacteria has been covered above.
posted by aniola at 2:31 PM on May 25, 2021

I mean, the flies probably wouldn't kill me, but frying oil is abundant and low-value.
posted by praemunire at 2:50 PM on May 25, 2021

Response by poster: I tossed it, not because science but ick factor. Like the time someone peed in our city’s open drinking water reservoir. Bureau drained the large volume, probably unnecessarily but still.
posted by Fortnight Bender at 3:27 PM on May 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'd just clarify it -- heat it up near the smoke point, scoop off any foam and floating bits, let it cool, then pour it off into a new container. If it smelled a little off after that (because fish) I'd turn it into soap. Home-made soap is wonderful, more people should make their own soap.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:27 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Have you people never gone camping? Get rid of the bugs, use the oil if it's not fishy, eat the fruit salad.
posted by troyer at 5:48 PM on May 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

frying oil is abundant and low-value.

We have an oil press. Frying oil is a lot of work if you DIY. (Mostly because you end up with a LOT of press cake that you then have to cook with so it doesn't go to waste.)
posted by aniola at 6:23 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would not hesitate for a second to use cooking oil that had a couple of dead flies in it, and certainly wouldn’t dump a half gallon of oil because of them. Scoop them out and call it good. If you eat fried food from restaurant kitchens you have definitely eaten food prepared in a fryer containing a dead fly.
posted by Jawn at 8:31 PM on May 25, 2021 [5 favorites]

Have you people never gone camping?

Nope! Literally never. And bugs are just one of the many, many reasons I never have and never will. That said, I wouldn't dump the oil because of the bug, but because it's probably fishy and unless I was cooking fish again, it would go.
posted by cooker girl at 6:37 AM on May 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ultimately, this does indeed come down to personal values. We all have different ethics. Cooking oil has low value to some of you. Some of us are rather rich, some of us struggle with poverty. Not wasting food has high value to me, even though I can afford to waste $10 worth of good oil.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:04 AM on May 26, 2021

You can get a half-gallon of canola oil (vegetable oil, as described in question) at the local supermarket for about $6. Are there some people for whom that expense is meaningful? Sure. But vegetable oil is one of the cheapest cooking basics you can get--that's why fried foods are a staple of cheap restaurants. (If you're broke, though, using enough oil to deep fry a single meal is already pretty wasteful. Restaurants use the same frying oil all day.)
posted by praemunire at 11:22 AM on May 26, 2021

This is about a 0.00000000002 out of ten on the "ick" scale for me. We've all eaten a lot more bug bits than we think we have.
posted by ook at 2:49 PM on May 27, 2021 [1 favorite]