Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire “butter-like” fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I’m not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I’m sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
If only vegetable oils existed…
You mean like palm oil?
Different use cases.
Fats that are solid ( or at least not kept liquid) are not directly comparable to oils. They fulfill a different function in baked goods. In particular, pie crust with vegetable oil would fail totally. It wouldn’t hold up.
Mind you, if you don’t object to hydrogenated oils, they can do the job. Yay margarine? But you can’t just dump 10 grams of canola into your biscuits and expect the results to look, taste, or feel like a biscuit. You’d get something, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Palm oil doesn’t tase good at all so you can just as well use margarine made from sunflower or canola oil.
It’s pretty tasteless overall.
And when it comes right down to it, hydrogenated oils are their own nightmare. There’s really no perfect choices for every person in every situation.
Like, lard and tallow work even better than butter in some applications, including some desserts. But then you run into the health side of things and vegetarians aren’t going to use them.
I personally don’t like palm oil either. I find it unpleasant for mouth feel. I’m just saying that it fills a role that other things don’t, and does it in a way that’s a different set of problems.