Vegetable oil is a product made from vegetable raw materials. Its nutritional value is very high, since fatty acids, phospholipids, vitamins and other useful substances, as well as fats, provide the human body with the necessary internal nutrition and concentrated energy.
What is vegetable oil made of?
The raw materials for the manufacture of this product are very diverse. They can be the seeds of oil plants - the sunflower that is familiar to Russian consumers, as well as soybeans, hemp, cotton, poppy seeds, flax, mustard, sesame seeds, caraway seeds and many others. The fruits of plants such as olives are also used as raw materials for the production of vegetable oil. Oil-containing processing wastes are also used for these purposes - wheat germ, sea buckthorn fruits, corn, fir, rice grains, tomatoes, melon seeds, grape seeds, watermelon seeds and apricot kernels.
In recent years, rather expensive, but very nutritious and valuable (not only in the food industry, but also in the beauty industry) vegetable oils obtained from nuts - macadamia, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, cedar, Brazilian nuts, coconut, walnuts, pistachios and many other, sometimes quite exotic, varieties.
The process of making oil from vegetable raw materials
For such production, two methods are used - pressing and extraction. The first is used to remove oil in the preliminary and final stages. For this enterprise, screw presses are used, which are currently divided into three groups or subtypes - forpress, or devices for preliminary oil removal, expellers or final pressing presses, as well as dual-purpose mechanisms.
Before pressing, the raw material is separated from the shell, then crushed until the cell structure is destroyed and for greater softness, after which it is subjected to moisture-thermal treatment, which aims at weakening the forces holding the oil on the surface of the raw material. However, such a technology, which in its essence has changed little since ancient times, but has only been improved technologically, does not provide complete oil extraction. The rest "gets" from the raw material using the so-called extraction.
The principle of this process is based on the solubility of vegetable oil in organic solvents. They can be extraction gasoline or hexane, used at temperatures in the range of 50-550 degrees Celsius in a specially designed extractor apparatus, when the last oil is isolated from the so-called residual meal.
Then the vegetable oil undergoes a purification procedure, during which all unnecessary accompanying substances are removed from it, thereby increasing the quality of the product, its cost and shelf life.
