What is the temperature when the oil is 60% hot?
2 Answers
The boiling points of edible oils: soybean oil 257℃, corn oil 246℃, peanut oil 226℃, peanut oil 135.6℃, sesame oil 129℃, sesame oil 215℃, soybean oil 154.2℃, corn oil 147.6℃. In daily cooking, it's easy to tell when the oil is 60% hot: place your hand about 1 cm above the oil surface; if you can hold it there without getting burned, it's about right. When the oil starts emitting blue smoke, it's about 80-90% hot. Be very careful when deep-frying at home, as home stoves are not as powerful as those in restaurants. Therefore, when deep-frying, the oil temperature is usually heated higher than needed, and a slight distraction can easily lead to a fire! It is recommended to use larger cooking utensils when deep-frying, and ensure there is a certain distance between the oil surface and the pot edge for safety.
I often deal with oil temperature issues in the kitchen and find that '60% heat' is around 180°C, which is a common cooking benchmark. Why do I say that? Because in traditional Chinese cooking, oil temperature is divided into ten levels, and '60% heat' refers to when the oil just starts to form small bubbles but hasn't reached boiling point, stabilizing around 180°C. To test it, you can dip a chopstick with a bit of flour into the oil: if it immediately bubbles and sizzles, then it's right. In practice, 180°C is the ideal frying temperature—for example, when frying spring rolls or dumplings, oil that's too low will make the food greasy, while oil that's too high will burn and smoke. For safety, I always recommend beginners not rely solely on intuition but to use a kitchen thermometer for accuracy. Oil temperature control also affects health, as high temperatures can cause oil to oxidize and produce harmful substances, so maintaining around 180°C reduces this risk. In daily cooking, I usually heat the oil to '70% heat' first, then reduce it to '60% heat'—this saves oil and avoids waste.
