Olive Oil Smoke Flash Points

When it comes to cooking with oil, smoke points are very important. These numbers indicate at what temperature a particular type of oil will smoke at. If your cooking process goes above that, your oil may impart an unwanted burned flavor into your product.  This is key for allowing manufacturers to choose the right oils for their production. 

The accurate smoke point for each type of oil may depend on who you ask.  You may get different smoke point temperature information from different suppliers -- even when they are supplying the same type of oil.  Smoke points can also vary based on if the oil is high oleic, if it's refined, if it's expeller pressed vs. solvent, and many other characteristics.  

Why the difference in smoke point?

You might be curious as to why there is a difference in smoke point depending on who you talk to. The reason is that every manufacturer has a slightly different chemical make-up of the oil because of processing methods, seed type, lab variations, etc.

These factors can all differ slightly which can affect the smoke point. You may also find that you find smoke point variations because of subjectivity during the testing and the certain lot that was tested at that time. 

Smoke, Flash & fire points of commercially available edible fats & oils

Because of the variations seen above, we are providing a general chart from the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, based on their own tests and findings.

Editors Note: “The values in this table represent typical smoke, flash and fire points for each commercially available edible fat and oil. The values are based on a single test for each fat and oil source, thus they do not represent a statistically valid mean or indicate of the range of values attributable to each of the source oils. Smoke, flash and fire points may vary within a source oil due to such factors as processing techniques, and/or seasonable variations. In addition, there can be analyst subjectivity when using this test procedure (AOCS Cc 9a-48 method)… Commercial samples were tested after deodorization [refining] and had a free fatty acid content of 0.05% or less.”

smoke point estimated reference chart

Make sure to keep in mind that the above chart is just what the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils released. 

Each supplier typically will test their own oil and offers their own suggested smoke points. This leaves a large amount of variance for what you will see industry wide as suggested smoke points. 

The above is a common guide that will give you a basic reference for smoke points for a number of different cooking oils. This will not reflect specific manufacturers' findings, so you may see different information on the chart above compared to your supplier's spec sheets. It is, however, a good guide in your initial research process.

What makes a smoke point so important?

If you were needing to fry your product at 480° F you wouldn't want to choose an oil with a smoke point of 300° F. You would find that if you heated the oil over it's smoke point it would begin to smolder, smoke or get a burned flavor that would change the final flavor of your product. 

You would also be toying with the lines of fire safety and exposing your production line to unnecessary risk. So these temperatures are all good indicators to be extremely conscious of.