Sometimes you feel like a nut.

So last Sunday I went on an expedition. I was determined to find the perfect peanut oil. I was determined to buy like a gallon of it to keep in my pantry. I usually only buy oil a couple times a year. We use a little bit at a time, but just in case you need to use a half a cup for a recipe or you want to fry, I like to have a big jug on hand.

Apparently those days are over.

Early Sunday morning I loaded up Thing 1 and drove to Fairway. I left Thing 2 and DH (who has been very sick recently) at home to rest.

For those of you who don't live in Manhattan, Fairway is a locally owned grocery store chain that has recently gone from three stores to I think 7 and maybe more. They have prepared foods, all the conventional varieties and a great selection of organics. Their organics range from everything from fruits and veggies, canned goods, frozen goods, brand name prepared foods to their own store brand of beef, free range eggs and even grass fed organic milk from a dairy farm in PA (The most local source of dairy I have EVER been able to find outside of the farmer's market and even that is 2 states away). They also produce/ import their own store brand varieties of everything from oiled packed sun dried tomatoes to whole bean coffees to fresh baked baguettes. I tend to buy their store brand items because they are slightly less expensive, high quality and they turn through them really quickly so they are fresher.

Fairway has organic olive oil bottled under their store brand label that is imported from Italy. One liter costs $11.99. The conventional variety costs $8.99. That is an increase in price of 33%, but I feel good about it and I don't burn though it all that quickly. Unfortunately they don't import any other oils under their store brand, so I was forced to look at national names.

I was not surprised to find that there was row after row of 'Vegetable Oil' and a long row of 'Canola Oil'. Down on the very bottom shelf I found one enormous gallon jug of peanut oil. Success! At least I thought. This peanut oil was a very inexpensive brand that listed nothing about how the oil was produced. I though for sure they used a hexane solvent to get at those nuts. I put it back.

The only other company even offering peanut oil was Planters. I have always liked that little peanut guy with the top hat and the monocle. I have a positive impression of the Planters company (apparently a division of Kraft Foods and even Nabisco-I am pretty sure all industrial food companies are owned by just one big conglomerate, but I haven't found the smoking gun yet. Just kidding, I don't want to get sued for libel!) But I figured if there was anyone offering pressed peanut oil, it would be from the company that produces nuts specifically.

On a side note I like companies that only do one thing. I like it when a clothing company sticks only to doing clothes but maybe does different brands. I like furniture companies that resist the temptation to make sheets and vases, you know? So I appreciate that the Planters product line sticks pretty close to nuts and their brethren.

The only problem with this oil? The bottle didn't say whether or not it was expeller pressed or solvent extracted. That was a red flag. Usually when a food product has the attribute that is the prize of the moment, it will be visible. Maybe they won't post it on the front, but other expeller pressed items I have come across have pretty sizable type on the back of the product calling out why I should pay more money for their product. I bought the small bottle anyway thinking the best of the company.

Next I did exactly what I would encourage anyone to do. I went to their website to do some research. Not only did I not find out anything about the method of extraction, they didn't even have peanut oil listed as a product!! They must not make a lot of peanut oil. So I moved onto phase 2. I emailed the company to ask them how they obtained the oil.

I received a response the next day that read as follows: "...Kraft Foods purchases oil used in our products from well established food oil manufacturers that use refining processes to clean and otherwise prepare the oil for food use as required by FDA regulation and good manufacturing processes." Ummm....I could have guessed all that.

I wrote them back and used more specific language. They actually wrote me back same day, and spilled it. They pressed first and used solvents on the remainder. Sigh. It stinks that I bought the bottle before I checked into it. However, I am really pleased that they did in fact come clean with me about what kind of process they used. I think half the issue I find with processed food is the lengths at which the food companies go to try and hide how they are doing business.

On a brighter note, a dear girlfriend of mine was at Whole Foods the other day and called me to say that they had organic, unrefined, expeller pressed peanut oil there. Hopefully it will not cost $45 a bottle once I find the time to get there. Perhaps this is a worthy project for the upcoming weekend.

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