What do you use instead of store bought cooking spray?

Olive oil cooking sprays are handy and expensive, I am talking about an aerosol can.  What are some alternatives?

A bowl of oil and a pastry brush?  Are there other solutions?

Edit to avoid confusion about different oils.

Here are some options. I have not personally used any of these.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-oil-sprayers-5118246

I don't know how to use cooking spray.  What situations does one use it and maybe I can share the style we use.

Although one friend has a refillable oil spray gadget.  Put the oil in and pump the lid up and down a few times to create pressure, then press the nozzle when you want to spray it.  But I don't know why.

Olive oil in a pump bottle.

r ranson wrote:I don't know how to use cooking spray.  What situations does one use it and maybe I can share the style we use.

Although one friend has a refillable oil spray gadget.  Put the oil in and pump the lid up and down a few times to create pressure, then press the nozzle when you want to spray it.  But I don't know why.

I use it to oil the waffle iron.  The bottom is easy though the top plates on the waffle iron are easier to oil with the spray.

A couple of years ago, I got an air fryer for Christmas.  The olive oil cooking spray came with it and a french dry cutter.  The instruction were to spray the potatoes, cook then flip and spray again.

That year I tried to buy something like your friends refillable oil sprayer gadget.  The sale was cancelled so I did not try again.

Does your friend like theirs?

My friend thinks their refillable oil bottle is the bees knees and fits very well with their kitchen style.

For air fryer, I put the veg in a bowl and massage a drizel of oil into them.  Usually I add spices. It seems to stay greased ths whole cooking time.

Waffle iron i don't use often.  But a butter wrapper rubbed on a warm grill works well.  It's a thing my grandmother picked up in The Depression, to keep old butter or margarine wrappers in the fridge for use to grease pans and the like.  I just sort of inherited the habit as I hate to toss food and these can be used two or three times before tossing.

A brush or paper towel diped in oil and quickly applied also work, but it's hot so fingers can hurt.

Another friend runs the block of butter directly on the hot griddle between waffles.  Tastes amazing, if a bit too much like burnt butter.

It was a while before I learned about how various cooking oils respond to heat.   The bottom of this page might help you select your best cooking oil options depending on the cooking temps

https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/krnc/monthly-blog/cooking-with-fats-and-oils/

oils can be solvents for all sorts of things, so simpler is probably better; ie:  glass container, brush or pour it on.

I have a refillable oil spray bottle, glass bottle, plastic spray lid. It gives either a very fine spray, or has a flip up lid for pouring. It's so good for controlling how much oil I use, and it wasn't expensive. I bought a similar bottle for adding just the right amount of vinegar to salads because I used to accidentally drown mine!

Cooking spray didn't appear in Australia until the 2000s I think, so I grew up not using it.

I use empty butter wrappers. Often they have a bit of leftover butter on them, and can just be used as-is to wipe the butter onto a pan. If the wrapper is clean, I can just grab a little bit of butter out of a different pack and use that with the butter wrapper.

Parchment paper can be used in the same way.

I mostly use lard or tallow or butter for cooking.  I put some on the pan as it's heating up and tilt the pan back and forth so it flows around and covers it all.  If I'm baking I'll put the fat in the pan in the oven, and when it melts take the pan out and tilt it the same way.

Olive oil is good but real unrefined olive oil is expensive and burns/smokes easily so I don't cook with it.  The less expensive olive oils and avocado oils are usually refined and/or cut with other refined oils like soybean oil.

My soap box:
I bet that refined oils are not healthy.  They aren't natural, require weird industrial/chemical processes, and only existed in the last ~100 years or so.  Animal fat, butter, or unrefined coconut oil if you are vegan, seem to me to be the best cooking oils.  These are mostly saturated fat, which you'll hear is bad for you.  I've done extensive research on this and believe that this was largely a scam to get people to eat refined oils and grains instead of real natural fat which is mostly saturated fat.  I haven't found any good evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy.  And, I've been eating lots of it my entire life and seem to be in excellent health.

I went through the lard and tallow experiences several years ago.

I have read here on the forum about all the good/bad things about different oils.

My question is how do you get those lard or tallow to replace cooking spray?

I can understand how putting the veg in a bowl and massage a drizzle of oil into them.  That might even work for melted lard or tallow.

How do you get oil on the hot top plate of a waffle iron?  Maybe the paper towel soaked in melted lard and carefully applied?

I use ghee for high temperature oven cooking, the smoke point is around 485 degrees. I also use it for stovetop cooking but usually use lard, butter or coconut oil.

Anne Miller wrote:How do you get oil on the hot top plate of a waffle iron?  Maybe the paper towel soaked in melted lard and carefully applied?

either paper towel with an oil or fat, or a silicon brush. For years I also had an "oil can" I brought from Japan/bought from Japanese stores that had a little string "mop" type thing you use to spread the oil around (but it got rancid very quickly and needed to be replaced often).

I also didn't grow up with cooking spray, and in the country where I live it's essentially non existent, but I do like the spray idea.
I have a spray bottle that i fill with sunflower oil, and generally use a squirt of that for greasing pans, waffle irons, cake pans, etc. If I have butter wrappers, even better, but they're not common here.
I used to have a pressurized pump spray bottle especially for olive oil, but it clogged way too easily and only lasted a few months. This one I have right now is a plain old plastic spray bottle I got from a restaurant supply and I've had it for years.

For a heated surface, I would recommend something like a pastry brush for applying a liquid oil to a hot waffle iron. I will admit, I use a natural fiber paintbrush for such a task!

Timothy Norton wrote: a natural fiber paintbrush for such a task!

I got my silicon brush as a freebie when i bought some sort of kitchen goodies in the past-- when it bites the dust, I'll be buying myself a paintbrush just for this purpose.

I sometimes use a bit of oil on a clean rag or paper towel.
.

Some kitchen gadgets queen gave me her cast off spray bottle. It works fine. It just doesn't get much use in my kitchen. Now, if I had a waffle iron...

It was from The Pampered Chef and looks like this one on Amazon.

Anne Miller wrote:My question is how do you get those lard or tallow to replace cooking spray?

Fair.  I guess my answer is I haven't run into any situation where I needed cooking spray - I haven't thought of making waffles.

If you have a cast iron waffle iron that's seasoned well initially you might not need to grease it at all.  

Any other kind of waffle iron I've seen had a toxic coating I wouldn't want to use anyway.

Philip McGarvey wrote:
My soap box:
I bet that refined oils are not healthy.  They aren't natural, require weird industrial/chemical processes, and only existed in the last ~100 years or so.  Animal fat, butter, or unrefined coconut oil if you are vegan, seem to me to be the best cooking oils.  These are mostly saturated fat, which you'll hear is bad for you.  I've done extensive research on this and believe that this was largely a scam to get people to eat refined oils and grains instead of real natural fat which is mostly saturated fat.  I haven't found any good evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy.  And, I've been eating lots of it my entire life and seem to be in excellent health.

You would bet correctly. The whole "cholesterol bad, animal fat bad" thing originated from a vegan with an agenda, who also had enough credentials to make it look convincing, and here we are today. (Dr.Eades at proteinpower.com had a whole rant on the subject, knew the guy and watched it happen in realtime, but now I cannot find it.)

A good general rule is if you have to do more to the oil than squeeze it out, wash out the acids, and filter out the impurities, it's not good for you. Soy and canola in particular (in its first life, canola was an industrial lubricant) are questionable. Corn oil is probably the only "safe" seed oil, as it can be processed with mechanical pressure, heat, and water, and does not require other solvents. But do you know how the company produced it? of course not. Olive oil is just mechanically crushed, centrifuged, and filtered, but be aware that commercial olive oil of uncertain source may actually be mostly soybean oil.

Coconut oil involves finely crushing the meat and waiting for the milk and oil to separate, but using a solvent would be a lot faster, so I'd kinda want to know how it was processed.

Bah. Just use butter and other animal fats, all good. Just don't burn 'em, any burned oil becomes not good for you. My inner biochemist wishes to also note that animal fats are a lot closer to your body's required balance of fatty acids, too.

I had to laugh at this a bit; I guess at myself really because I never knew there was such a thing as cooking spray.

I don't think I've used a spray oil in my adult life. And I really like cooking. I just never got accustomed to using it, and I forget that it's a thing that exists. If you think it's indispensable, I'd be curious to hear about what your specific application is.

If the point of the spray version is to get a really thin layer, then a reusable plastic spray bottle would do pretty much the same thing as the aerosol version. Or a brush, like you mentioned. Or rubbing a cold stick of butter around.

If you don't care about a thin layer, but you've tried to use oil poured from the bottle and found that stuff sticks to the pan more than with the spray, it may be that there's some difference in the oil rather than the delivery mechanism. For example I find that eggs stick to the pan way more when I use veggie oil compared to using butter. I don't have any scientific explanation for why that would be the case, I just know it from experience, so I always use butter when frying eggs. Also some people say that letting the pan come up to heat before adding oil helps things stick less; I haven't found a huge difference but I've also never tried to test it scientifically at all.

That is interesting about eggs sticking less with butter. I fry eggs at very low temperatures (200-250 per the electric frypan) so it's generally not an issue, but now that I think about it... I think most things stick less with butter. So long as you use enough butter.

If you can still see the food, there's not enough butter!

We bought a disposable can of spray oil four years ago when we got our first air fryer but we haven't used it up yet. Thirty years ago we had a refillable stainless steel and plastic can that you could pressurize by hand-pumping but it kept getting clogged with sticky olive oil so we got rid of it. Mostly we use brushes for the kind of thing you're talking about though we don't really use the waffle iron very often.

I have a nonstick waffle iron, and I never grease it. I just put lots of butter in the batter. (Actually, that's how some old recipes said to do it, too.)


The bitter butter made the better batter bitter,
But the better butter made the bitter batter better.

I use a brush for the waffle iron.    I think a nice glass spray bottle would work well with olive oil or avocado oil if you keep it warm enough to keep the oil liquid.  

Christopher Weeks wrote:We bought a disposable can of spray oil four years ago when we got our first air fryer but we haven't used it up yet. Thirty years ago we had a refillable stainless steel and plastic can that you could pressurize by hand-pumping but it kept getting clogged with sticky olive oil so we got rid of it. Mostly we use brushes for the kind of thing you're talking about though we don't really use the waffle iron very often.

FWIW, I would bet that four year old oil is rancid.  It might not smell terrible if it's refined oil because the stuff that would start smelling off was removed in the refining, but the oil itself will be rancid aka oxidized, and not good to eat.

If you do use some kind of spray bottle make sure you're using it up and replacing the oil frequently.  Olive oil typically goes rancid 3-6 months after opening.  

But again, there aren't really any natural liquid oils that are good for cooking with.

I suppose if it's a really small amount and just for lubricating the surface, maybe a little rancid refined oil isn't so terrible.  I wouldn't want to eat it, but quantitatively in terms of how much rancid oil you're consuming, spraying the surface of the waffle iron with rancid refined oil might be equivalent to eating a couple of conventional tortilla chips.

Rancid fat (doesn't matter if it's animal or vegetable) is very, very bad for you. Among other things it binds vitamin E to the point that the resulting catastrophic deficiency can cause retinal deterioration and irreversible blindness.

Tho I don't suppose there's any reason it can't be used as lamp oil, so at least it doesn't go to waste.

Someone did some experiments with commercial food oils as lamp fuel. They found that a 3 pound can of Crisco, using a standard candle wick, will burn for about a week. Smoky, but if the lights are out, better than nothing!

We bought a couple of spray bottles (like what you would use for certain cleaning products) from the grocery store that were marked as food safe and we just refill them. If I need it spread more evenly I use my finger or a brush once I put a few squirts in. We mostly use vegetable/canola oil though.

Anne Miller wrote:My question is how do you get those lard or tallow to replace cooking spray?

In situation like this I hold a piece of lard (or better ruminant suet) and smear the hot surface with it - "painting" with fat. Sometimes I fry pancakes this way.

Anne Miller wrote:How do you get oil on the hot top plate of a waffle iron?  Maybe the paper towel soaked in melted lard and carefully applied?

My sister-in-law showed me how her grandma used to use a paper towel butter to spread oil on a pan for making thin pancakes. I've done similar with my waffle iron. (I first just tried smearing the butter around with a silicone spatula and silicone brush, but it was hard to get it evenly coated. If I get the butter in there first, and then wipe with a paper towel, it makes sure there isn't a big blob of butter to leak out of the waffle iron, and it makes sure that everything got coated with butter.)

Rez Zircon wrote:I have a nonstick waffle iron, and I never grease it. I just put lots of butter in the batter. (Actually, that's how some old recipes said to do it, too.)

This!

My mom has a big list of recipes for making waffles, and the ones that were for cast iron waffle makers asked for a LOT of butter in the batter.

Here's some of the tips she had found for cooking waffles in a cast iron skillet without them sticking:

You'll want to use an old-fashioned waffle recipe that includes a lot of butter in the batter, which makes the waffles taste better (& obviously helps prevent sticking.

Before you get started, be sure that your waffle maker is well seasoned. A well seasoned waffle maker is key to creating a non-stick surface. Don't ever wash your waffle maker in water (& definitely not soap). I should just be wiped down with a dry towel (or paper towel) after use. If you have any sticking, scrape it off with a butter knife & re-season that spot.

When you put the waffle maker on the stove, turn the heat up very high. The pan should be very hot before you add batter, & this helps create a crisp exterior while also flash cooking the outside. High heat actually prevents cooking, believe it or not,

If your waffle maker is well seasoned, it should only need to be greased every 2-3 waffles to prevent sticking, but you'll want to grease it between each waffle anyway. That helps the waffles fry on the outside and it creates a crisp surface.

Butter has a lower smoke point than lard. (It's about 300ºF for butter, compared to around 375º for lard.) Properly rendered leaf lard is neutral & flavorless, perfect for making pies, donuts, & greasing waffle irons. Other people use coconut oil. With butter, the pan may start to smoke if you get your waffle maker too hot. Lard is more traditional, as the higher smoke point means you can cook your waffles at around 350ºF, which will leave them crisper.

I use a silicone pastry brush to crease the pan with melted butter or lard between each waffle. An Old fashioned natural bristle pastry brush works, too, if you get the food-safe ones. )

Here's the recipe for old-fashioned waffles (apparently it came from a really old copy of Joy of Cooking, one so old that "it still had recipes for woodchuck and possum"):

We give you three choices to prepare this recipe: use 4 tablespoons for a reduced-fat waffle, 8 tablespoons for a classic light & fluffy waffle; or 16 tablespoons for the crunchiest most delicious waffle imaginable.

Dry Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups flour, all-purpose or pastry

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

Wet Ingredients:

3 large eggs, well-beaten

6-16 tbsp unsalted butter (1/2 to 2 sticks)

1 1/2 cups milk

Before beginning, be sure your cast iron waffle maker is well seasoned.
Whisck toether dry ingredients.
in a sperate bowl, beat together wet nigredients, including melted butter, eggs, & milk.
Add the wet ingreidnts to the dry and stir unto; just combined. Do not overwork the batter.
Grease the waffle iron with butter or lard.
Preheat your waffle iron until very hot, just short of the smoke point (just under 300ºF if greasing with butter, or just under 375ºF if using lard.)
Pour waffle batter into the center of the waffle iron, spreading it until it's within about 1/2 to 1/4 inch of the edge. Close the waffle iron & immediately flip.
Cook for about 2-3 minutes on the second side, then flip back to the first side for another 2-3 minutes.
Remove waffle with a fork when fully cooked & golden brown on both sides.
Grease the waffle iron before adding more batter, and repeat.

I looked at "cooking spray" in the grocery store.  There seems to be four main types (i never knew it was so popular), all presented in a pressurized spray container.

The most common was a mixture of fat and oil.  A close second is an oil based spray, usually olive oil.  These two styles seem to be all purposes for greasing baking trays, fry pans, griddles, et .  Or even using as salad dressing according to the back of the tin.

All of those uses could be replaced with a cooking oil like olive or sunflower (quite a few were specifically oilve oil cooking sprays) or with greases like butter or lard (lard being another common ingredient), depending on the situation.

The other two types seem to be baking specific (but still called cooking spray).  These included a grease and/or oil.  One type included flour and the other type a "sticking agent" to stop it sliding down the edge of the baking pan.  Sticking agent was not identified, but I'm guessing from the description, a starch?

The situations described on the back of these cooking sprays are all situations were I use butter (often leftover from the wrappers described above).  But cooking oils like olive and sunflower also work in these situations.

One of the cooking cooking sprays specifically advised against using their spray in high heat, specifically avoiding the air fryer.  None of the others mentioned the air fryer.


It was fun to learn more about this product.  I had intended to buy some to try, but my frugality won as it's appears most of the money goes to the convince of the spray system and there is very little grease or oil in the tin for the price.  

I can see why the refillable spray bottle would work as a replacement for most use.  Most of the cooking sprays are oil and persevering agents, so I imagine being able to choose our own oil would be a nice benifit.

Although I am still curious if the spray mechanism makes any difference to the flavour.  

My mom has a N2O whipped cream sprayer thing. She just puts in a new N2O cartridge when it stops whipping the cream. I wonder if one of those might work for oil?

She does have to keep buying new N2O cartridges, though.

I think she has something like this. If anyone wants to know more, I can ask which specific one she has.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:My question is how do you get those lard or tallow to replace cooking spray?

In situation like this I hold a piece of lard (or better ruminant suet) and smear the hot surface with it - "painting" with fat. Sometimes I fry pancakes this way.

I think this is the best!   When you harvest your own animals, you have chunks of fat.  You can just paint it on any surface.   Duck or goose fat is very nice to cook with.

Tyler Grace wrote:I use ghee for high temperature oven cooking, the smoke point is around 485 degrees. I also use it for stovetop cooking but usually use lard, butter or coconut oil.

We have moved to using ghee since a friend gave us 2 jars  that he made.  It is the best we have found and stores perfectly in the pantry without going rancid (2 years now).
Both my grandmother and mother saved the butter wrappers, as Kate says, and stored them for greasing cooking pans and cake tins.  We use them to line cake tins and pudding bowls, especially at Christmas.
Ghee is also great for seasoning cast iron ware.  We then pack the greasy paper into a toilet roll inner to use as a fire starter.
This is some good information on ghee: https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/ghee/
Not sure why, but we have problems with our olive oil sprayers clogging up so have retired them.

I was pondering this exact question and this popped up in my inbox under "Interesting permies threads you might have missed", so thanks everyone!