Cooking with Coconut Oil

I recently discovered Coconut Oil.    I have been learning more about which oils are best for high temp cooking. I've heard that many golden oils found on the shelves at the grocery are already rancid.   Heating almost all oils starts to hydrogenate the oil.    

There's a lot of great information online and I encourage you to search it out and make your own choices.   
Here's an article I read about it on the New York Times blog :

Whether coconut oil is good or bad for you remains a topic of debate in the nutrition community. But as Melissa Clark reports on Wednesday in the Dining section, coconut oil is winning some fans.

Two groups have helped give coconut oil its sparkly new makeover. One is made up of scientists, many of whom are backtracking on the worst accusations against coconut oil. And the other is the growing number of vegans, who rely on it as a sweet vegetable fat that is solid at room temperature and can create flaky pie crusts, crumbly scones and fluffy cupcake icings, all without butter.

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

One reason there is so much confusion about coconut oil is that it contains saturated fat. Federal dietary guidelines recommend that consumers limit saturated fat to less than 10 percent of daily calories. But nutritionists note that not all saturated fats are the same.

Marisa Moore, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, a nonprofit association of nutritionists, said, “Different types of saturated fats behave differently.”
The main saturated fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, a medium-chain fatty acid. Lauric acid increases levels of good HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, and bad LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, in the blood, but is not thought to negatively affect the overall ratio of the two. She went on to say that while it is still uncertain whether coconut oil is actively beneficial the way olive oil is, small amounts probably are not harmful.

But the best reason to use coconut oil is the taste it adds to food. “Virgin coconut oil has a deep coconut flavor that persists even after cooking,” writes Ms. Clark.