Yuk, that doesn't belong in my food!

As a continuation from yesterday, in regards to vegetable oil, How do they get all that vegetable oil out of all those soybeans and corn kernels and rapeseeds?

If you are like me and assume the best, you would have visions of the seeds all being ground up and pressed to extract the oil, probably on some contraption in a factory that looks very much like a Dickens novel. Almost like Oliver Twist was sitting in the employee break room. I don't have a scientific mind or any scientific experience, so my solutions to problems are somewhat simplistic.

Well as it turns out, pressing through a machine called an expeller is one way of extracting oil. But as you'd guessed, it recovers only so much oil. The leftover waste of crushed up seed pulp still has a lot of oil into. So what the vast majority of manufacturers do is use a solvent made of a gasoline byproduct called Hexane (C6H14) to extract the oil. The process of using a solvent is much cheaper and more efficient than pressing the oils.
Hexane is a colorless liquid that evaporates pretty easily because of it's low boiling point (50-70 degrees Celsius). And if I am reading these websites correctly, it is the part of gasoline that smells like gasoline, because it is one of the first compounds in the gas to evaporate. Use of Hexane as a solvent has been deemed safe because the hexane is largely nonreactive with the food with which it is coming in contact. Hexane is also used in glues for shoes, leather products, roofing and textile manufacturing.

The seeds are crushed and then flaked into very small particles. That mash is combined with hexane and heated with steam. This process extracts all the oil in an oil and hexane solution.
That solution is taken away and the hexane is removed through an heated evaporation process. The oil is further refined and cleaned while the hexane is reused in another batch of mash.
Most of the hexane that is lost remains in the mash, or the leftover fiber and pulp of whatever seed was crushed in the first place. I didn't do a lot of research as to what happens to the leftover mash. I don't want to extrapolate on where it goes, I would bet that it is used in some industrial function.

I firmly believe that natural products are the way to go for my family. I don't want to eat anything that has had harsh chemicals used to make it. I also don't like the idea that it required me several days of research to find out how this food product ends up in my belly. Foods like this are faceless. You don't know who grew them, how they were processed or much else. These are foods that our great grandparents weren't cooking with a whole lot. Butter and Lard were much easier to render. And although olive oils and others have been made for centuries, Olives were not such a plentiful crop on the cold east coast of the colonial United States. Our food culture simply did not include olive oil because it wasn't available.

Today, I am looking for alternative oils. And there are alternatives. While I'd like to stay away from Canola, I understand that not everyone will find fault with it's GMO heritage. I have decided that I'd like to try peanut oil. It has a high smoke point and it is a food that in it's most basic state is edible. Cottonseeds, not so much.



Please read my blog tomorrow as I look for a peanut oil that is made without hexane solvents...








Notes:

Hexane. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org 9 May, 2010.
Vegetable Oil Processing. Environmental Protection Agency. epa.gov. 10 May, 2010

What is a Canola?

This question was one of the first that prompted me to start this long journey of education and food discovery. The answers were shocking enough to me that it motivated me to start blogging, so that I can share my answers with anyone willing to click towards my page. Oil and it's process to the table will consume much of my postings this week. So if you like what you read today-stay tuned.

I have been cooking with vegetable oil and canola oil for years. In fact I can't remember having olive oil in the house until I was at least in high school. As an adult I use olive oil for about 80% of the cooking I do in my house. But there are certain applications that require something flavorless. I like veg oil for baking muffins, stir frying homemade Chinese food and our babysitter frys french toast in it (among other things). I also use a lot of butter. I really really love butter, and compared to my fellow Americans, I am not afraid of it in the least. But this post is about vegetable oil, not butter

At the beginning of this project I got to asking myself, as I had before without actually looking for the answer, "What is a Canola?" And for that matter, "If vegetables are fat free, how are they producing all this oil?"

You ready?

Vegetable oil comes from seeds. Kind of like nuts which we easily understand have a lot of oil. Vegetable oil is a generic industry term for any kind of oil derived from plant seeds, like corn, soybeans, cottonseeds or rapeseeds. What are rapeseeds? Yeah, more on that later.

Soybean oil is probably the most common veg oil. It's the one you never see labeled on it's own in the grocery store. And there are a heck of a lot of soybeans grown in this country. Check the ingredients on a bottle of veg oil and it will probably say 'soybean oil'. But in some processed foods veg oil could be a general term for any oil that fits the bill, corn, soybeans, cottenseed, etc. All these oils are essentially flavorless and are interchangeable, so manufacturers look for the cheapest. It may be any of these depending on the season.

So what are rapeseeds? Rapeseed is a type of oil seed producing plant that is especially productive at producing oil. But the big issue is that naturally evolving rapeseeds produce an oil that tastes really gross. It has high levels of erucic acid. I am not sure if it's toxic, but it tastes gross. Hundreds of years ago, rapeseed oil was used for oil lamps in Asia and Europe. In the Second World War it was used in manufactering.
Well, as manufacturers usually do, a few scientists in the 60s and 70s in Canada got together and said, hey, we have an opportunity to really have a cheap plentiful supply of cooking oil that is low in saturated fat (the evil fat of it's day). But we have to work on this plant to produce edible oil. Through selective breeding they produced a rapeseed plant that produced edible oil. And the FDA pronounced it safe for consumption in the early 80s.
Now the problem is what do we call it? 'Rapeseed oil' doesn't sound like a best seller. So the scientists said, it's edible because we got rid of the erucic acid so let's call it CANada Oil, Low Acid. And canola as we know it was born.
Since the birth of Canola, scientists have tinkered with it even further. Now 80% of the canola oil on the market comes from genetically modified canola plants.

Tomorrow we'll discuss how they get the oil out of all those soybeans, corn kernels and rapeseeds. Then maybe you'll be willing to join in the land of peanuts. (Or palm, or coconuts....)

Notes:

Canola. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org. 11 May, 2010

Vegetable Oil. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org. 11 May, 2010