Southwest China's Foundational Rapeseed Oil (菜籽油简介)

Описание: In Sichuan and throughout the Chinese Southwest (Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan as well), the fundamental cooking oil is something called “Caiziyou”. It’s basically like rapeseed oil, but… not quite. We mention it quite a bit in these recipes, and’ve gotten a bunch of questions on the topic. So we figured it was high time for an introduction.

So right. You can buy the stuff (soon, 3/1 at the latest I’d gather) from Mala Market here:

https://themalamarket.com/collections...

It’s not really sold out, they just haven’t quite started selling it yet. Should be quite soon. Originally we wanted to time everything so that they started selling it right when we released this video but… I’ve made them wait a long time on this video, so was a bit of a timing kerfuffle (this was a really tough video for me to cut, in fairness to myself). You can also have them notify you when it’s ready to go out the door, if you want to do that.

Huge thank you to Xiangxi Miaojiang Elder for his video on making Caiziyou, it was an enormous help to us and I’d heavily recommend going and watching the whole thing:

   • Видео  

Also, the Derrycamma farms video was quite interesting as well. It’s one of the more Irish things I’ve seen in a while, check it out here:

   • Irish Rapeseed Oil: How it's made  

Also, the full video of the harvest of winter kale is courtesy of Urban Farmer Curtis stone. You can check out his full video here, I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole binging some of his videos:

   • HARVESTING KALE IN THE SNOW!!  

Lastly, enormous thank you to Michael Rogge doing god’s work by uploading old, rare footage to YouTube. That footage was from his “Old Chengdu, Western China, in 1940”, but I’d also heavily recommend checking out his whole China playlist. Great stuff:

   • Old Chengdu, Western China,  in 1940 成都  

Also, I’ll get the stock footage credits out of the way here. The bit of the lettuce (yeah I know that wasn’t brassicas), the drone footage of the dude walking through the rapeseed fields, and the two shots of the container ports are all from videvo.net. I just discovered them trying to whip together this video, and… that website is awesome. Actually free, actually solid stock footage – didn’t know such a thing existed. Now we just need something similar with music and I can finally get rid of this BwB outro music…

Speaking of which, that outro music is "Add And" by Broke For Free   / broke-for-free   (lovely tune but man I do want something a bit less… done)

And oh! There was a tiny bit of footage of Shenzhen there that’s via Blondie in China. Our favorite China travel vlogger (or second favorite, depending on if Trevor James counts or not)… check out her channel here:

   / @blondieinchina  

SOURCES:
I’ll continue to update this as I sort through my mess of notes.
On Erucic acid’s (lack of) toxicity:
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/publi... (this seems to have gone off line the last couple days, it’s Food Standards Australia New Zealand’s “Erucic Acid in food: A Toxicological Review and Risk Assessment”… I’ll also see if I can upload this somewhere for you guys)
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/di... (“American Chefs Discover Mustard Oil”, this has the interview with the professor from Harvard School of Public Health)
https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/... (“Erucic Acid in Feed and Food” via the EFSA CONTAM panel)

Much of the history of rapeseed in China came from Needham’s “Science and Civilization in China Vol 6, Part V: Fermentations and Food Science”. The tables and illustrations came from there too.

Some crucial information about the history of the Brassicas came from Chapter one of Dixon’s “Vegetable Brassicas and Related Cultivars” https://www.cabi.org/isc/FullTextPDF/... Ditto with “Genetics, Genomics, and Breeding of Oilseed Brassica”. The latter also has a good bit of information about Chinese semi-winter rape. The base of the history here re rapeseed in China came from a mix of Needham and these two books.

For further info regarding rapeseed in China, I used Xiaoyu Wang’s “Flavored Rapeseed Oil in China” (excellent piece), Bonjean et al’s “Oil Crops and Supply Chains in Asia”, and a bit of the Crop Science Society of China’s “Rapeseed research and production in China”. The table of the percentage of Chinese rapeseed that was double low was from Fu et al’s “Present and Future of Rapeseed production in China” http://webcache.googleusercontent.com...

Apologies in advance if I was wrong about any details here. If anyone has any corrections/clarifications, let me know and I can put them here.