Coco Fat

The question of fat was raised yesterday in an email. Specifically, where’s the fat in the macaron cookie recipe below? Don’t most cookies us butter as a base? The answer is that the fat is in there, just not in the form of dairy fat. The fat that macaroons contain — and they contain a good deal of it — is in the form of coconut oil. Dried coconut flake (or copra as it’s called in the bulk grocery biz) is over 70 percent coconut oil. It doesn’t seem particularly “oily” to the touch since coconut oil is solid at room temperature. Which begs the question why it isn’t just called “fat.” All I can say is that somewhere someone decided we’d call fats from plants “oils” and fats from animals “fats.” It’s not a texture thing, it’s a source thing.

Not many of us remember nowadays that coconut oil was once as ubiquitous as vegetable shortening in food. It was in everything from candy to commercial baked goods, and was one of the primary fats in margarine. The reason, because once you refine coconut oil it’s almost totally flavorless. That makes it handy as a general-purpose fat: for cooking, for baking, for frying, to spread on your toast…anything. Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it’s artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats. And so, quietly, coconut oil began to disappear from ingredient lists, to the point that today it seems like a rare and exotic substance.

A macaroon or two every so often, however, won’t do you any harm at all.