Corn oil substitutes

A pale, mild, refined oil pressed from rapeseed, with a smoke point in the same range as corn oil.

Best for

cakes, muffins and brownies, deep frying and pan frying, salad dressings and mayonnaise, greasing pans, anywhere a recipe says corn oil

The default answer and a genuinely invisible swap. Both are refined to near-neutrality, both stay liquid in the fridge, both take frying heat, and both leave a cake with the same moist, tender, slightly springy crumb that oil-based cakes have. If you taste them side by side, canola is a whisper cleaner and corn oil has the faintest buttery-sweet edge, which almost nobody detects inside a finished dish. It is also usually cheaper.

The generic blend sold as vegetable oil, most often soybean or a soybean and canola mix, and the direct shelf equivalent of corn oil.

Best for

all baking, deep frying, sauteing, dressings, any general-purpose cooking

Interchangeable with corn oil in every practical sense, and in most American kitchens the two bottles are used for identical jobs. The smoke point is comparable at roughly 450 F, the flavor is similarly absent, and the texture in the mouth is the same. There is no adjustment to make. If a fried food tastes very slightly different, that is the oil's freshness rather than its species.

Light refined seed oils, widely used in Middle Eastern, Turkish and European home cooking, all close to flavourless.

Best for

frying and deep frying, cakes and quick breads, mayonnaise and dressings, roasting vegetables

Excellent and effectively indistinguishable in a finished dish. Refined sunflower oil is very slightly more assertive than corn oil, with a faint clean seed note some people notice in a mayonnaise or a plain dressing but nobody notices in a cake. Grapeseed is the cleanest tasting and thinnest of the three but sits a little lower on smoke point at around 420 F, so it has less headroom for a long deep-frying session. Buy refined or high-oleic versions rather than cold-pressed sunflower oil, which has a real toasted-seed flavor and smokes far too early to fry in.

A high-smoke-point refined oil, prized for deep frying because it stays stable and clean over long cooking.

Best for

deep frying, especially chicken, doughnuts and fritters, stir frying, high-heat roasting

Arguably better than corn oil for deep frying, since it holds up well over repeated batches and leaves fried food crisp rather than greasy. Refined peanut oil is close to neutral, with a barely-there nutty warmth that suits fried chicken and doughnuts and is undetectable in a cake. The obvious caution is peanut allergy: never substitute it without telling whoever is eating, and choose canola instead if there is any doubt.

Butter melted and cooled, which supplies fat plus flavor and a little water.

Best for

cakes, brownies and muffins, cornbread, cookies, quick breads

A real change rather than a swap, and often a welcome one. Butter is only about eighty percent fat, so replacing oil with the same volume of butter slightly reduces the fat and adds water, which makes the crumb a little firmer, less uniformly moist and more cakey, and it gives the finished bake a rich dairy flavor oil never provides. It also stales faster, since oil keeps a crumb soft for longer. Do not use it for deep frying, where the milk solids burn.

Olive oil that has been refined so it is mild in flavor, with a smoke point around 465 F, not extra-virgin.

Best for

frying and sauteing, roasting, savoury baking and focaccia, some cakes, especially citrus and olive-oil cakes

Usable, and its smoke point is actually higher than corn oil's, which surprises people. The one to avoid for this purpose is extra-virgin, which is peppery, grassy and bitter and will make a vanilla cake or a doughnut taste distinctly of olives; in a savoury dish that same character is an asset. Light olive oil is refined and mild enough to disappear into most recipes.