There’s a piece of kitchen advice almost everyone has heard: keep your good extra virgin olive oil for salads, and cook with something else. It sounds sensible. It’s also wrong.

Ask any Mediterranean kitchen

For generations, cooks across the Mediterranean have used olive oil for everything. In Sicily, as in Greece, Spain and southern Italy, it starts the sauce, roasts the vegetables, fries the fish and finishes the plate. Our grandmothers didn’t keep one oil for salads and another for the pan. Olive oil was simply the cooking fat, used every day, at every temperature a home kitchen reaches.

The idea that it’s “too delicate” for heat is recent, and it doesn’t come from these kitchens.

Where the myth comes from

The idea rests on one number: the smoke point, the temperature at which an oil starts to smoke. Extra virgin olive oil has a lower smoke point than refined oils, so it was assumed to be less suitable for heat.

But the smoke point doesn’t tell you what really matters: how an oil holds up when it’s heated, and whether it breaks down into unwanted compounds.

What the research shows

In 2018, a laboratory study in Australia (De Alzaa, Guillaume and Ravetti) heated extra virgin olive oil and other common cooking oils, including canola and coconut oil. The oils were heated up to 240 °C and held at 180 °C for six hours.

Of all the oils tested, extra virgin olive oil produced the lowest level of polar compounds, the by-products that form when oil degrades under heat. Canola oil, despite its higher smoke point, produced high levels. The researchers’ conclusion was clear: smoke point does not predict how an oil performs when heated.

What does predict it is the oil’s composition. Extra virgin olive oil is rich in monounsaturated fats, which resist heat better than the polyunsaturated fats found in many seed oils. It also contains natural antioxidants, which help protect it while it cooks.

More polyphenols, a better cooking oil

Those natural antioxidants are mainly polyphenols, the same compounds that give a fresh, early-harvest oil its bitterness and peppery finish. In the pan, they act as a shield: they are used up first, protecting the oil itself from breaking down.

Research has shown this clearly. A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry followed virgin olive oil through repeated frying. As long as its polyphenols remained, the oil stayed stable. Once they were largely depleted, degradation accelerated. A 2025 study in Foods found the same pattern from the other side: an extra virgin olive oil with added olive polyphenols stayed stable for longer under prolonged frying than the same oil without them.

The lesson is simple: the more polyphenols an oil starts with, the longer it is protected in the pan. A fresh, early-harvest extra virgin olive oil isn’t too good to cook with. It’s one of the best oils you can cook with.

Cooking with it can even add something

A 2019 study at the University of Barcelona looked at sofrito, the slow-cooked base of tomato, onion and garlic found across Mediterranean kitchens. When the vegetables were cooked in extra virgin olive oil, compounds from the vegetables, including carotenoids and polyphenols, moved into the oil. Before cooking, the oil contained no measurable carotenoids. After 30 minutes in the pan, it contained almost as much as the raw tomato.

In other words, the oil doesn’t just carry heat. It becomes part of the dish.

What changes when you heat it

Being honest matters here. Heat does change extra virgin olive oil: some of its fresh, grassy aroma and part of its polyphenols fade with long, hot cooking. That’s exactly the protection at work. It means the oil gives you different things at different moments.

That’s why, in Sicily, we use it twice:

• In the pan: for sautéing, roasting, slow-cooked sauces and shallow frying.
• At the end: a raw drizzle over the finished dish, where its green, peppery character comes through in full.

How we use it at Borgo Naera

On our grove in western Sicily, there’s only one oil in the kitchen. It goes into the pan first thing for the sauce. It’s poured over bread at lunch, and drizzled over grilled vegetables in the evening. We harvest early, while the olives are still green, because that’s when the oil is at its most alive: bitter, peppery, full of character. And that character carries through to the cooking.

We don’t think of it as something precious to save for special occasions. Olive oil was always meant to be used generously, every day, the way it has been in this part of the world for centuries.

So whatever oil you have at home, use the best one you can find, and don’t be afraid to let it meet the heat. Start the sauce with it, roast the vegetables in it, fry the egg in it. Then pour a little more over the plate, just as it’s done at every Sicilian table.

Sources

• De Alzaa F., Guillaume C., Ravetti L. (2018). Evaluation of chemical and physical changes in different commercial oils during heating. Acta Scientific Nutritional Health, 2(6), 2–11. actascientific.com/ASNH/ASNH-02-0083.php
• Gómez-Alonso S., Fregapane G., Salvador M.D., Gordon M.H. (2003). Changes in phenolic composition and antioxidant activity of virgin olive oil during frying. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 51(3), 667–672.
• Mehany T., González-Sáiz J.M., Pizarro C. (2025). Improving the Biostability of Extra Virgin Olive Oil with Olive Fruit Extract During Prolonged Deep Frying. Foods, 14, 260.
• Rinaldi de Alvarenga J.F. et al. (2019). Using Extra Virgin Olive Oil to Cook Vegetables Enhances Polyphenol and Carotenoid Extractability: A Study Applying the sofrito Technique. Molecules, 24(8), 1555. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6514867