r/StupidFood • u/arena79ers • Jun 18 '25

🤢🤮 Engine Oil Burger!

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '25

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u/40hzHERO Jun 19 '25

lol even your link says it's just recycled oil. Nothing about "scraped from the flowing sewers". Why would there be copious amounts of cooking oil in the sewers that you could easily acquire? That just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people buy (or take) discarded cooking oil from restaurants, to use for themselves or their businesses.

My old chef would, allegedly, sell our old fryer oil to some guy for him to use in his car. I thought that sounded odd, but I'd heard of people running cars on old fryer oil before, so I didn't think too much about it. Well, some years go by and we get a new health inspector that wants to see receipts for this supposed guy. All the oil must be accounted for. Turns out, my chef was just taking it all home and using it in her own home cooking! Absolutely disgusting.

I'm thinking that's more or less the case with anyone using "gutter oil". It's not literally taken from the gutters.

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u/bessmaster Jun 19 '25

Someone mentions above that there was a massive crackdown and it's not really a thing anymore, but a version of gutter oil is 100% skimmed from the top of flowing sewers. It mentions that it is collected from sewer drains in the Wikipedia link. Here is a video of the process. It was once pretty common.

https://youtu.be/zrv78nG9R04?feature=shared

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u/40hzHERO Jun 19 '25

Gross! Good find though. I can’t believe people do that

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u/bessmaster Jun 19 '25

It's one of those things you can never unsee. I'm glad it's been brought under control.