Multiple Indicted on Charges of Theft and Re-Sale of Restaurant Cooking Oil
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Seriously though, what's the usual lifecycle for those waste oil tanks? Will the owner sell the contents to a recycler when it's full?
I'm not sure what the restaurant gets paid for it, probably not a lot, they may even have to pay for the service like they do for trash dumpsters. But unlike trash, the oil has a value so they probably do get paid a little bit.
They are also legally required to dispose of waste cooking oil properly. It's not toxic per se, but you can't just dump it down the drain.
The search keyword is the day is "fatberg".
That's what the gutter is for: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04
This is an organized crime thing, apparently there's a chinese mob?
These people were stealing oil from restaurants and selling it to downstream users for industrial uses (making biodiesel is one)
Google suggests at about $0.5 per gallon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu24aQ3D5sk
Some things require a fryer. The point is that there is a 1:1 correspondence between what can cook in an oil fryer versus what can cook in an air fryer, and the result is 85% as crisp.
In fact I hold the oil against the restaurant because the oil is a multi-faceted health hazard.
Chris Young, of Modernist Cuisine and Chefsteps fame, disagrees with you. There’s a difference in the physical construction of actual air fryers vs just fast convection ovens. Every convection oven/air fryer combo I’ve ever seen has the fan on the side, so the behavior and performance is different.
See: https://youtu.be/yw--NLjZBNk
It isn't clear to me that it matters if a fan is on the side or below or sucks or blows, because with sufficient speed you get turbulence, and air is flowing in all sorts of directions. The claim doesn't pass a basic physics smell test, nor does the video's claim about blowing from the side "fighting the natural tendency of steam to rise", which is only relevant if your fan is seriously under-powered. Also, where does that steam go? It is just re-circulated, unless the oven is properly vented, which is the real factor here. You only get "pockets of humidity" in a really trash convection oven or if you seriously over-crowd your food, or in bad "energy-efficient" ovens that maintain efficiency by just trapping steam. Could it be that the average / cheap convection oven is poorly vented and has an underpowered fan, relative to the average air-fryer? Probably. But I remain unconvinced they are meaningfully different from a decent convection oven.
Part of the reason I don't believe the claims is that I use the technique in the video already to make very crisp oven fries that approach the ones in the video even in a non-convection, regular oven. Getting this right was an obsession for me for some time, and the trick is getting the par-cook perfect, not over-shaking, the right kind of potatoes, the stupid amounts of oil (which effectively causes the outsides to fry anyway and properly crisp), and the right oven temp. You do regularly have to also toss them in the oven, just like he regularly shakes his in the fryer. Getting all those things right is the main trick here, and is very, very hard to do right, probably about 90% of the challenge.
Perhaps a regular oven can get you to only 80%, a convection to 90%, and an air-fryer to 100% of what he achieves, or perhaps the air fryer makes it less work and more consistent, since you can toss them with less overall heat loss. Or perhaps if he spent just as many weeks perfecting a convection oven fries they would be indistinguishable. The side-by-side comparison with a convection oven is what I need to see to be actually convinced an air-fryer is anything unique, and weak and untested arguments about air-flow direction aren't doing it for me.
The broader TLRD is there's no market for gutter oil for cooking anymore when UCO sell more to industrial recyclers. Gutter oil for cooking in PRC, TW disapeared once waste cooking oil recycling industries sprung up. I think SKR avoided it all together by building biodesel management earlier.