Why You Should Be Cooking With Your Good Olive Oil (Not Saving It)

Back in 2021, we published a short piece asking whether cooking with extra virgin olive oil is actually safe. The answer, backed by the 2018 Australian oxidative stability study, was a clear yes. That post has been one of our most read ever since, which tells us something: a lot of people are still uncertain about this, and the myth has not gone away.

So this is the full version of that story.

Not a summary. Not a quick reassurance. A proper account of where the “do not cook with your good olive oil” advice came from, why the science contradicts it so completely, and what it means in practice for the oil you use every day.

Because there is something more specific worth addressing here, and it barely gets discussed anywhere: it is not just that EVOO is safe to cook with. It is that high-polyphenol EVOO is among the most heat-stable cooking fats in existence, and the quality of the oil you start with makes a measurable difference to what ends up in your food.

Here is what the science actually shows.

Where the Myth Came From

The “do not cook with EVOO” story has a traceable origin. It did not come from nutritional science or culinary tradition. It came from marketing.

In the 1960s and 1970s, industrially produced seed oils, including soybean, canola, corn, and sunflower, entered the market at scale. These were new products that needed to compete with established cooking fats. The key selling point the industry settled on was smoke point: the temperature at which an oil begins to visibly smoke. Seed oils have high smoke points. Olive oil has a moderate one. The narrative practically wrote itself.

High smoke point became synonymous with “good for cooking” in food media, cookbooks, and popular nutrition advice. The simplification stuck for fifty years.

The problem is that smoke point tells you almost nothing useful about whether an oil is safe or healthy to cook with. It tells you when an oil starts to smoke. It says nothing at all about what is chemically happening inside the oil before, during, or after that point.

What Actually Matters: Oxidative Stability

When cooking oil is exposed to heat, oxygen, and light, it undergoes oxidation. This is the process that matters for safety. Oxidation produces a range of breakdown products, the most concerning of which are polar compounds and aldehydes. Polar compounds are widely used as the scientific measure of oil degradation during frying. Aldehydes, particularly trans-2-alkenals, have been associated with cellular damage in research settings.

The critical question is not “at what temperature does this oil smoke?” It is “how much of this harmful chemistry does it produce under real cooking conditions?”

This is exactly what a landmark 2018 study published in Acta Scientific Nutritional Health set out to measure. Researchers from the Modern Olives Laboratory Services in Australia tested ten common cooking oils, including extra virgin olive oil, virgin olive oil, refined olive oil, canola, rice bran, grapeseed, coconut, high-oleic peanut oil, sunflower, and avocado oil, under standardised cooking conditions.

The results were striking.

Extra virgin olive oil produced the fewest polar compounds of all ten oils tested. It also showed the highest oxidative stability, meaning it resisted chemical breakdown most effectively. This was despite having one of the lower smoke points among the oils in the study. Grapeseed oil, a popular choice among health-conscious cooks specifically because of its high smoke point, produced polar compounds at more than twice the rate of EVOO.

The conclusion was clear: smoke point is not a reliable predictor of cooking safety. Oxidative stability is. And on that measure, EVOO is the best-performing cooking fat available.

Why EVOO Is So Stable Under Heat

The oxidative stability of extra virgin olive oil comes down to its chemistry, and there are two reasons it performs so well.

Reason one: low polyunsaturated fat content. Polyunsaturated fats, or PUFAs, are inherently unstable under heat. They have multiple double bonds in their carbon chain, each of which is a point of vulnerability to oxidation. Grapeseed oil contains around 70% PUFAs. Sunflower oil sits at around 65%. Canola is approximately 28%. Extra virgin olive oil, by contrast, contains only around 8 to 14% PUFAs. Its dominant fat is oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat with a single double bond, which is significantly more heat-stable.

Reason two: polyphenols. The antioxidant compounds in high-quality EVOO, including hydroxytyrosol, oleocanthal, and oleuropein, do not just benefit your health when consumed raw. They actively protect the oil itself during cooking by scavenging free radicals and interrupting the oxidation chain reaction. This is why high-polyphenol oils outperform low-polyphenol oils under heat, even oils of the same type.

Refined olive oil, for comparison, has had most of its polyphenols stripped out by processing. It has a higher smoke point than EVOO on paper, but it loses its chemical advantage during cooking precisely because the antioxidant protection is gone.

What the Temperatures Actually Mean in a Real Kitchen

The smoke point of high-quality extra virgin olive oil sits between 180°C and 210°C (356°F to 410°F), depending on freshness, acidity, and variety. Fresher oil with lower free fatty acid content will sit at the higher end of that range.

Here is how that maps to everyday cooking:

• Gentle sauteing: 120 to 160°C. Well within range.
• Roasting vegetables at 200°C: The food itself, because it contains water, rarely reaches the oven temperature. The oil remains comfortably below its smoke point.
• Pan-frying at medium-high heat: Typically 160 to 180°C. Still within range for good-quality EVOO.
• Deep frying: Usually conducted at 170 to 180°C. A 2007 study found that EVOO remained stable after more than 24 hours of continuous deep frying at 180°C, far outperforming sunflower oil under the same conditions.

The one category where caution is warranted is very high-heat searing or wok cooking at above 220°C. At those temperatures, any EVOO will approach or exceed its smoke point. For those specific techniques, a refined oil or neutral high-heat fat is the more practical choice. But this represents a small fraction of home cooking.

For everything else, from scrambled eggs to roasted chicken to a pan of caramelised onions to an olive oil cake, your good oil is not just adequate. It is the best choice.

What Happens to the Polyphenols During Cooking?

This is a reasonable concern, and it deserves an honest answer.

Yes, heat does degrade some polyphenols. Studies suggest that cooking at moderate temperatures reduces polyphenol content by roughly 40% compared to raw oil. At higher temperatures or prolonged cooking times, that figure rises.

But there are two important qualifications to keep in mind.

First, a significant portion of the polyphenols survive cooking. If you are using an oil with 967 mg/kg of polyphenols, as in the current Loukakos Estate 2025/26 harvest, even a 40 to 50% reduction leaves a meaningful antioxidant load in your food. Compare that to a supermarket oil starting at 100 mg/kg: after the same heat reduction, there is almost nothing left worth measuring.

Second, the polyphenols that are lost during cooking are being put to work protecting the oil and your food from oxidative damage during the cooking process itself. They are not wasted. They are doing their job.

The practical recommendation is one you might already follow instinctively in Mediterranean cooking: use your high-quality EVOO for cooking, and then finish the dish with a raw drizzle before serving. This approach maximises both cooking stability and the delivery of intact polyphenols at the table.

The Mediterranean Did Not Get This Wrong

It is worth pausing on the obvious historical evidence here.

Greeks deep-fry vegetables in extra virgin olive oil. Italians sauté garlic in EVOO over high heat. Spanish cooks make gambas al ajillo in bubbling olive oil. Turkish, Moroccan, Lebanese, and Tunisian kitchens all use olive oil as their primary cooking fat, at all temperatures, for all methods.

These populations have been doing this for thousands of years. They have not shown the health outcomes you would expect if they were routinely exposing themselves to harmful compounds from degraded cooking fat. In fact, the Mediterranean diet consistently produces some of the best cardiovascular and longevity outcomes of any dietary pattern ever studied.

The Anglo-American food media told people to stop cooking with their best olive oil. The Mediterranean world simply never listened. The science now confirms who was right.

Why the Oil You Start With Matters

Not all extra virgin olive oils are equal under heat, and this is not a small distinction.

The oxidative protection provided by polyphenols is proportional to the polyphenol content of the oil. A low-quality EVOO with 80 to 150 mg/kg of polyphenols, which is common in mass-produced supermarket bottles, offers limited antioxidant protection during cooking. Its primary advantage over seed oil is its monounsaturated fat composition, which does count for something, but the chemical resilience of a genuinely high-phenolic oil is in a different league.

Koroneiki olives, the variety grown on the Loukakos Estate for five generations in the Peloponnese, are known for producing oil with high natural polyphenol content and a robust fat profile. The 2025/26 harvest was independently certified at 967 mg/kg of polyphenols by the University of Athens. This is not a number that appears in supermarket olive oil. It is the result of early harvesting, immediate cold pressing, and nature-led farming practices that preserve the olive’s natural chemistry from grove to bottle.

When you cook with an oil of this quality, you are not wasting it. You are using it exactly as it was designed to be used.

A Note on Storage

One final point that often goes unmentioned in discussions of cooking with EVOO: the quality of your oil before it reaches the pan matters enormously. Heat, light, and air all degrade olive oil over time. An oil that has been stored in a clear bottle on a sunny windowsill for six months has already undergone significant oxidation before you have even turned the hob on.

Store your olive oil in a cool, dark cupboard, away from the oven. Keep it sealed when not in use. Check for a harvest date, not just a best-before date, and aim to use the oil within 12 to 18 months of harvest for peak quality and polyphenol content.

Fresh, well-stored, high-phenolic EVOO is one of the most heat-stable cooking fats in existence. Treat it well, and it will perform accordingly.

The Bottom Line

The smoke point myth was built on a simplification that served the seed oil industry, not the consumer. Decades of food chemistry research have since established that extra virgin olive oil, particularly high-polyphenol EVOO, is not just safe to cook with. It is the most oxidatively stable common cooking fat available.

Cook your eggs in it. Roast your vegetables in it. Fry your fish in it. And then drizzle a little more over the top before you sit down.

If you want to know more about the specific compounds that make high-phenolic EVOO different, our post on what polyphenols mean for your health covers the science in depth. And if you are ready to cook with an oil that actually performs, you can explore the current harvest in our shop.