Could Any Neutral Cooking Oil Ever Be Worth $20?

I am the opposite of immune to a culinary gimmick. If you put a product in fancy packaging and tell me it will make my dinner delicious, I immediately turn into Fry in that “shut up and take my money” meme and plunk down my credit card. I have paid exorbitant sums for cans of fish, splurged on fancy imported olive oil, and dropped way too much cash on wagyu beef. But even I was pretty skeptical of Algae Cooking Club, a new neutral cooking oil made from (you guessed it) algae that costs $20 plus shipping.

Asking 20 American dollars for a bottle of plain oil was immediately scoff-inducing. This was not an oil made from organically grown, hand-crushed olives in Liguria, something I might be willing to pay a premium for due to its artisanal nature. Nope, the sleek metal bottle — sent to me by Algae Cooking Club — contained a clear, scentless oil distilled from oceanic blue-green goop. According to the company, the oil is created by fermenting algae, then expeller-pressing its Omega-9-rich oils into recyclable vessels. It allegedly contains 25 percent more of those Omega-9 molecules than avocado or olive oil, both of which have some proven health benefits, and 75 percent less saturated fat. I’m sure all of that is very persuasive to those who care deeply about their health, but as someone who ate Haribo fizzy cola gummies for lunch today, I was unmoved.

From a cooking perspective, Algae Cooking Club’s oil does have some demonstrable benefits. Its smoke point is an impressive 575 degrees Fahrenheit, making it ideal for high-temperature searing and ripping hot grills. Avocado oil’s smoke point is a comparatively meager 525 degrees, though in my own personal experience I have never seen it start to smoke unless I really screw up by, say, accidentally leaving the burner on high. The algae oil is also extremely neutral in flavor, almost tasteless, which I suppose is good when you’re cooking foods with especially delicate flavors.

The company also boasts widely about the algae-based cooking oil’s sustainability benefits. “Algae has the potential to produce high-quality fats, proteins, and nutrients in a matter of days with a fraction of the land, water, and carbon needed, without sacrificing flavor and quality,” the company’s website reads. There’s even a graph that shows how much lower its carbon dioxide emissions are than the production of olive or avocado oil. The aluminum bottle, too, is “infinitely recyclable.”

The first time I used the oil, I simply toasted a piece of sourdough bread in a pan. I wanted to taste the “slightly buttery” notes touted on the bottle, making toast a perfect vehicle for this experiment. I drizzled a teaspoon or so into the skillet, swirled it around, and waited until it felt appropriately warm to plop in my slice of bread. The bread toasted nicely on both sides, though not any better or worse than if I’d just used a drizzle of olive oil. I didn’t detect any of those buttery flavor notes, just a light slick of oily nothingness on my lips. Apparently, I don’t have the “sommelier’s palate” capable of tasting the “hazelnut bouquet at the end.”

The next obvious application for the oil was a french fry. If you’ve ever gotten the last batch of fries at the end of a long night at a fast food joint, you know exactly how yucky-tasting oil can impact the flavor. I sliced a potato into thin batons, soaked them in cold water to remove some of the starch, and pan-fried them in approximately four dollars’ worth of oil, or about a quarter of the bottle. Delicate bubbles formed around the potatoes as they fried to a crisp golden-brown, and after a sprinkle of flaky salt, they were some of the best french fries I’d ever eaten in my life. The exteriors were perfectly fried, and the earthy potato flavor was just right. In this application, the Algae Cooking Club oil proved that it was, in fact, worthy.

I immediately followed my french fry experiment by shallow-frying another potato’s worth of fries in avocado oil; their flavor was nearly identical to the first batch. Another test with a $3 bottle of vegetable (read: soybean) oil from the supermarket yielded slightly worse results — the oil’s smell and taste were a little more detectable — but the fries were still totally edible. Turns out, almost any potato fried to a crisp in fresh oil is probably going to be pretty good, regardless of how much you spend on the cooking oil.

I next toasted a slice of bread in organic sunflower oil, and also noticed no discernible difference in flavor in comparison to the Algae Cooking Club oil. In the context of toast, this was actually a bad thing, since both oils lacked the buttery notes of well, butter, or a bit of grassiness that a splash of olive oil would lend.

Algae Cooking Club’s key selling point is that its oil is “chef-grade,” which means it has earned the endorsement of chefs like Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm. And maybe for a chef like Humm, who charges hundreds of dollars for a single meal, a pricey bottle of oil makes sense. Perhaps it will stand up better than other oils to hundreds of fried okra or potatoes or whatever is on the constantly changing menu every single week. Or maybe, if Algae Cooking Club’s sustainability claims are to be believed, it will help a restaurant to minimize its environmental impact.

But for everyone else, especially those of us looking to make the most out of our increasingly limited grocery budgets, dropping $20 on a bottle of oil feels like a real waste of money. It is, to be sure, a perfectly nice cooking oil. Its bottle looks great on my cabinet, and it has worked just fine in several applications. But there are plenty of high-quality, organically produced oils on the market, all of which offer similar purported benefits to Algae Cooking Club’s oil, and at a fraction of the cost. And if I really want my food to taste better and be more sustainable, I’m lucky to have so many better options — like, for example, spending that cash on seasonal produce grown by a local farmer who’s investing in regenerative agriculture. In that case, I would at least be spending my money on something that actually does taste markedly better than the cheap stuff in the supermarket.