Hatched from peanuts, the south’s hot new oil
Born out of desperation, chefs rave this southern treat tastes ‘alive and vibrant’
There may be more improbable culinary trails than the one that leads from a red clay road in Georgia, America’s most prolific peanut-growing state, to Beyoncé’s plate at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.
But as zero-to-hero food tales go, this is a good one.
The star is cold-pressed green peanut oil, which some of the best cooks in the South have come to think of as their answer to extra-virgin olive oil.
Buttery, slightly vegetal and hard to find, southern green peanut oil is a new entry into the growing regional oil game. This is not the peanut oil that slicks countless woks and fills Chick-fil-A fryers, though it is made from the same runner peanuts. (They are the smaller and more uniform cousin of the Virginia peanuts you may find at a baseball game.)
The nuts are pressed at low temperatures on Clay Oliver’s farm. He lives about south of Atlanta and makes some 1,500 litres a year. Chefs turn poetic when they describe it.
“The first time I tasted it, it was as if I was standing in a field pulling the peanuts out of the ground and eating them,” said Sean Brock, the chef whose restaurants in Charleston, S.C., and Nashville, Tenn., are considered among America’s best.
“This tastes alive. This tastes vibrant. It tastes like fresh dirt. It’s that moment the plant comes up from the earth and the oxygen hits it for the first time.”
He and other fans say that the oil may be the most exciting new culinary concept to come from the south’s peanut culture since George Washington Carver’s agricultural research a century ago.
Most peanut oil is processed with heat and chemicals to create a cooking medium that is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t taste like much and can withstand long bouts of high heat. There are some boutique coldpressed roasted peanut oils but they have a more distinct peanutty flavour.
Few have tried making cooking oil from fresh green peanuts, which, when first pulled from the ground, can be as perishable as tomatoes. Oliver, 40, pressed his first batch in 2012, and now has a tiny culinary hit on his hands. He is already so wary of competitors that he won’t let his process be photographed.
The idea came to him out of desperation. His father died in 2008, when the recession hit the hardest. He and his brother, Clint, were left to figure out how to cover the cost of running their century-old family farm.
“I read The Grapes of Wrath,” Oliver said. “I was like, ‘This is coming true here.’ ”
He started looking for new ways to make money. One idea was producing biofuel. Another was making cold-pressed canola oil.
An extension agent showed him a jar of peanut oil someone was using for tractor fuel and the two ideas came together: What if he coldpressed the nuts and seeds that grew around him? He bought a heavy tabletop press but was such a novice that he had to call the manufacturer to figure out how to turn it on.
He pressed sunflower seeds, then pecans. It was nothing but kitchentable trial and error. At first, he wasted more oil than he poured into Mason jars.
One of the region’s biggest peanut-processing plants is nearby, so Oliver started pressing raw green runner peanuts, the kind harvested on about 283,000 hectares in Georgia. He tried selling it locally, but at $12 (U.S.) for 16 ounces, it wasn’t a big hit.
“People are like, ‘I can get peanut oil for $15 a gallon,’ ” he said.
Then came the big break. Someone from Georgia Organics, a non-profit group, recognized that the oil might fit the growing interest in both southern food and handmade farm products.
He suggested that Oliver visit chef Steven Satterfield, whose Atlanta restaurant, Miller Union, is a regular on the short list of best Southern restaurants.
Satterfield, who considers himself a student of the goober, was going to Charleston to shoot an episode of The Mind of a Chef, the PBS show that starred Brock. Satterfield threw some of the oil into his bag.
On the show, Satterfield and Brock went crazy over it.