The oil in food cooked outside is often not the oil you keep at home

Have you ever turned over a packet of namkeen or biscuits — and found palmolein in the list?

What oil is in food cooked outside

A lot of food eaten outside the house is not fried in the bottle you keep at home. Packaged snacks, biscuits, and many restaurant fryers in India use refined palmolein. It is cheap, it has almost no smell, and it lasts in a kadai that stays hot all day. That is the point of it.

Palm oil is a permitted, labelled ingredient under FSSAI. Manufacturers have to write the specific oil on the pack — not a vague “edible vegetable oil.” So the next packet you open will usually tell you. This is not a scare story, and it is not a ban. It is a mill story: that oil was built for a factory and a fryer, not to taste like a seed.

Why palmolein smells like nothing

Turn the packFSSAI asks manufacturers to name the specific oil. On namkeen and biscuits, that name is often palmolein — refined, deodorised, built for a fryer.

Commercial palmolein is refined. The fruit is pressed, then the oil is treated so it looks clear and sits on a shelf or in a fryer. The last of those steps is deodorising — high heat and steam, well above anything a cold press ever reaches — to strip odour and colour. After that, the oil does not smell like palm. It barely smells at all.

That is useful if you run a busy kitchen and want every batch of pakora to taste the same. It is a different job from the bottle you pour at home for talimpu, dosa, or the vegetables you cook for your family.

Eating out will still happen. The useful habit is to know which mill you are eating — and to keep a different mill on your own shelf.

What the research actually found

A July 2026 review in Frontiers in Nutrition (PubMed Central PMC13371722) puts the mill in plain terms: cold-pressed oil is squeezed from the seed without adding heat. Refined and solvent-extracted oils go through high-temperature steps, including bleaching and deodorising. Hexane is often used first, to pull more oil from the seed. Those steps are how you get a cheap, odourless, long-life oil — the kind a packet and a restaurant fryer actually want.

We wrote the kitchen version of that mill story here: what actually happens to the oil before it reaches your kitchen shelf. This piece is the next question: once you leave the house, whose mill is in the food?

How we do it at Masalaa.com

We do not press palm. We do not sell it. We press sesame, safflower, and coconut on a hydraulic press in Hyderabad — small batches, no added heat, no chemical solvents, packed after PhonePe confirms. That bottle is for the Indian kitchen at home. Eating out will still happen. The packet of namkeen will still happen. The useful habit is to know which mill you are eating, and to keep a different mill on your own shelf.

What this is not

This is not a claim that palmolein is illegal, or that every hotel uses it, or that food cooked outside is a disease. FSSAI permits palm in packaged food when it is named on the label. Some kitchens use other refined oils. Read the pack. Cook at home when you can. Pour an oil that still smells like the seed.