Used cooking oil? You bet! Am saving!

Now that we are aware of the value of used cooking oil, let's look into ways to save it from our food.

If you are into boiling soup with meat, you will notice that the fat from the meat will rise above the surface of the soup. Since it is not healthy to take too much oily stuff, you can skim it off the soup with a fine mesh scoop.

Should you have any leftover soup in your pot, pour it into a bowl and wait till it is cold before storing it in the fridge. If you check it the next day, you will notice a film of opaque fat that you can easily remove with a spoon. If you do not want it to turn rancid, scoop that into a glass bottle and keep it frozen in the fridge.

The top layer that you see in this photo is actually chicken fat from a leftover dish I made for dinner yesterday.



My daughter helped me to scoop the fat out...



and put it into a cooking pot.



This is actually still good for cooking another dish with.

Don't believe me? Check out how my fried rice cooked with this fat and leftover rice turned out.



To add more flavour to it, I added eggs with salt, leftover meat, soya sauce and some garlic oil. If you have enough fat from the chicken, your fried rice will taste a little like chicken rice.

I used to buy only lean meat and request my chicken supplier to skin and remove fat from the white meat. If you are a regular customer, I am sure that your supplier will not mind giving you extra portions of fat that his customers had requested him to remove from the meat.

Here are other ways you can extract oil from your red or white meat.

Method 1
1) Remove fat and skin from your red or white meat.
2) Dice the fat and skin.
3) Heat up a pan and add a little water to it before you place your fat and skin into the pan.
4) Keep heating this till you see oil melting into the water.
5) You can keep adding a little water if it dries up. This way, your fat will not burn black.
6) It is done once you noticed that the fat and skin don't shrink any further.

Don't worry if you have added too much water into the pan. Just cool the liquid down before pouring it into a bowl. Put it into the fridge and skim the fat off the next day.

Method 2
Follow steps 1 to 4 but this time do not keep adding water to the pan. The idea is to fry it till the fat and skin is crispy brown. Strain the oil to store and use the crispy fat to add flavour to your fried noodle or rice.

If you think that is not healthy for you, than mix it into your pet food. Your pets will love it.

Remember to make use of the sauce that is still on the pan before you wash your pan. Less oil on your pan means less detergent = less water used.

Another golden rule is not to wash your plastic wares with oily pans or you will have to wash your wares many times over to get rid of the fat.

If you think you are able to collect enough used cooking oil to start your recovered cooking oil business, check out these links:

Set up a business? You need calculators.

Setting up business in Malaysia

Ministries in Malaysia handling grants, licences and permits? Found at one spot.

Need other sources of green funds? Look for "birds of a feather" and possibly a chance to win a green award along the way.

This is it for the moment till I get my hands on more useful links to start this business.