From fine dining to fast food, Bay Area chefs are switching to this new ingredient

If you’re not olive oil in the kitchen, you’re nobody. But olive oil, which is healthy and delicious, is expensive, and it isn’t a workhorse. That award goes to canola, palm and soybean oil, of which Americans consume an estimated 11.56 million metric tons per year. And increasingly, they’re being scrutinized for their impact on our planet and health. 

One competitor hoping to challenge them is Zero Acre Farms, a new kind of oil made with minimal environmental impact through a fermentation process.

When Kyle Connaughton, chef and co-owner of three-Michelin-starred SingleThread in Healdsburg, first got samples of the oil, he thought it wouldn’t stand up. “What we found was that it tastes better — more neutral — and its behavior in high-heat cooking is far superior than anything out there,” he said.

Zero Acre produces its high-smoke-point, clear cooking oil by a process that begins with microbes fed on sugars from sugarcane. You can sauté, fry and roast with it. Like olive oil, it can create salad dressings. Zero Acre stays liquid at room temperature, is high in monounsaturated fat — considered heart healthy in oils — and very low in saturated fats.

Jeff Nobbs, who co-founded Zero Acre in 2020 with biochemist Stephen del Cardayre, has been daydreaming about how to get bad oils out of our food system for a decade. “They’re so prevalent,” he said. “They’re in every packaged food and are super cheap.”

The benefits of Zero Acre include its use of an abundant and inexpensive crop — though it does, despite the name, require some acreage. Sugarcane has a higher yield than soybeans, and in Brazil — where Zero Acre’s oil is made at larger scale —  the crop depends solely on rainfall. The waste from making sugar, called bagasse, is burned to make steam energy to power the plant. 

At Zero Acre’s HQ, scientists in lab coats are working to engineer better microbes that will output higher amounts of oil. This will bring down the price — currently it costs more per pound than soybean oil — and help with adoption. They’re fiddling with different strains as well as conditions in bioreactors — small vessels that create optimum conditions for oil production. Eventually, microbes express a variety of lipids, which create Zero Acre’s oil.

Zero Acre has been on the market since August 2022, and it’s quickly gaining momentum. Shake Shack uses soybean oil for its frying but is testing Zero Acre at two Manhattan locations. Even though Zero Acre is more expensive, Shake Shack’s costs remain steady because it can use less oil in its fryers. 

In tests, Zero Acre has seen 10%-15% lower oil uptake, or absorption, with its product versus common vegetable oils, Nobbs said. Most fry oil at fast- food and quick-service restaurants is changed infrequently, which isn’t good for humans. When seed oils like canola and soybean are heated at high temperatures in deep fryers, and used over long periods of time, they build up damaging chemicals, according to an investigation by Consumer Reports. Zero Acre oil can be used for more rounds of frying with far less toxin buildup in the air. It’s also more stable for frying, and far less susceptible to oxidization and turning rancid.

Peppers for habanero salsa cook in a fryer at Copas, a Mexican restaurant and cocktail bar. The restaurant has switched to oil from Spotlight Foods, a company in Alameda.

But how do the fries taste? The food website Tasting Table called the oil a “game changer,” reporting that the new Shake Shack fries “hold onto their quality as they cool” and had a “creaminess” in taste “similar to coconut oil.”

In a push to use more sustainable ingredients, Hopdoddy, a Texas-based burger chain, transitioned 10 of its more than 50 locations exclusively to Zero Acre. In addition to using less oil, the chain told Nobbs that french fries and chicken tenders “simply taste better.”

In the Bay Area, there are a handful of chefs tapping Zero Acre. Chef Stuart Brioza is using it at his three San Francisco restaurants — the Progress, Anchovy Bar and State Bird Provisions. Brioza first encountered the oil in a small vial held aloft by Nobbs. 

“The thing I noticed immediately was buttery, lightly toasted notes,” he said. “It was delicate, elegant and perfectly neutral, which I loved.”

The chef decided to have a blind taste test with his kitchen team. He whipped up mayo from scratch using every oil on hand. Zero Acre won. 

“It’s amazing the difference in flavor, color and how it emulsifies,” he said. As soon as Zero Acre ramped up production, Brioza switched everything over. “Zero Acre is our kitchen workhorse oil.”

At SingleThread in Healdsburg, chef Connaughton is also a convert. He’s now using Zero Acre for everyone from guests to his staff at family meal.

Initially, he assumed there would be some compromise in flavor to be environmentally better. Connaughton calls it the “paper straw effect” — no one likes a paper straw functionally better than a plastic straw, but we’ve decided to replace it.

Connaughton used it on tempura, which he takes very seriously. “We were focused on making that piece perfect,” he said. The results were pure and satisfying. “It was the true taste because of the smoke point and cleanliness of the oil,” he said. “It was frying better and lasting longer.”

An employee arranges churros at Copas, a restaurant that has converted to using a cooking oil made through fermentation from the Alameda company Spotlight Foods.

Zero Acre isn’t yet sold at grocery stores, but it’s available online in shiny silver aluminum bottles that are easy to recycle. Similar oils are on the market, including one from Alameda’s Spotlight Foods, which is made from algae (also a microbe) fed on sugar, also in Brazil. At Copas in San Francisco, chef Julio Aguilera is using the algal oil for everything from fish tacos to churros. Aguilera replaced canola oil in his deep fryer with Spotlight and he’s already seen that he’s not using as much. 

“Oil is one of those ingredients we take for granted as a chef,” Aguilera said. “Even when you get to fancy places, there’s no fryer but there’s a pot with oil.” 

Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of two-Michelin-starred Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, is “very reluctant about the possibility of food-tech solving our food issues,” but when he received samples he thought it was “powerful.”  He gave it to his team and they played around with it. “For high smoke point, it’s very good.” Eventually, Barber invested a “tiny amount” in the startup.

“The intoxicating part of Zero Acre is the idea that you can disrupt a complicated, entrenched and very powerful food chain. If this was to really take off …” the chef trailed off.

Reported for the SF Chronicle on Dec 15, 2023.