Products / Vegetable and Olive Oils
Vegetable Oils: soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, Olive Oil
Sunflower Oil
Refining sunflower oil through solvent extraction, de-gumming, neutralization, and bleaching can make it more stable and suitable for high-temperature cooking, but doing so will also remove some of the oil's nutrients, flavor, color (resulting in a pale-yellow), free fatty acids, phospholipids, polyphenols, and phytosterols. Also, some of the polyunsaturated fatty acids will be converted into trans fat due to the high temperatures involved in the process. Unrefined sunflower oil is less heat-stable (and therefore well-suited to dishes that are raw, or cooked at low temperatures), but it will retain more of its original nutrient content, flavor, and color (light-amber).Refined sunflower oil is used for low-to-extremely-high-temperature cooking. As a frying oil, it behaves as a typical vegetable triglyceride. Unrefined sunflower oil is a traditional salad dressing in Eastern European cuisines.
Olive Oil
Olive oil is an important cooking oil in countries surrounding the Mediterranean, and it forms one of the three staple food plants of Mediterranean cuisine.
Extra virgin olive oil is mostly used as a salad dressing and as an ingredient in salads.
It is commonly used in cooking for frying foods or as a salad dressing. It can also be found in some cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, soaps and others.
There are many olive cultivars, each with a particular flavor, texture, and shelf life that make them more or less suitable for different applications, such as direct human consumption on bread or in salads, indirect consumption in domestic cooking or catering, or industrial uses such as animal feed or engineering applications. During the stages of maturity, olive fruit changes colour from green to violet, and then black.
Canola / Rapeseed Oil
Canola / Rapeseed oil is one of the oldest known vegetable oils. There are both edible and industrial forms produced from the seed of several cultivars of the plant family Brassicaceae. Historically, it was eaten in limited quantities due to high levels of erucic acid, which is damaging to cardiac muscle of animals and imparts a bitter taste, and glucosinolates, which made it less nutritious in animal feed.Rapeseed oil can contain up to 54% erucic acid
Canola oil is a food-grade version derived from rapeseed cultivars bred for low erucic acid content. Also known as low erucic acid rapeseed (LEAR) oil, it has been generally recognized as safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration. Canola oil is limited by government regulation to a maximum of 2% erucic acid by weight in the US and the EU, with special regulations for infant food. These low levels of erucic acid do not cause harm in humans.
In commerce, non-food varieties are typically called colza oil.
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Soybean Oil
Soybean oil contains only trace amounts of fatty carboxylic acids (about 0.3% by mass in the crude oil, 0.03% in the refined oil). Instead it contains esters. In the following content, the expressions "fatty acids" and "acid" below refer to esters rather than carboxylic acids.
Per 100 g, soybean oil has 16 g of saturated fat, 23 g of monounsaturated fat, and 58 g of polyunsaturated fat.The major unsaturated fatty acids in soybean oil triglycerides are the polyunsaturates alpha-linolenic acid (C-18:3), 7-10%, and linoleic acid (C-18:2), 51%; and the monounsaturate oleic acid (C-18:1), 23%. It also contains the saturated fatty acids stearic acid (C-18:0), 4%, and palmitic acid (C-16:0), 10%.The high-proportion of oxidation-prone polyunsaturated fatty acid is undesirable for some uses, such as cooking oils.