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Vegetable oil is a liquid derived from plants. These are triglyceride-based, and includes cooking oils like sunflower oil, solid oils like cocoa butter, oils used in paint like linseed oil and oils for industrial purposes, including as biofuels.
Vegetable oils, or vegetable fats, are fats extracted from seeds, or less often, from other parts of fruits. Like animal fats, vegetable fats are mixtures of triglycerides. Soybean oil, rapeseed oil, and cocoa butter are examples of fats from seeds. Olive oil, palm oil, and rice bran oil are example of fats from other parts of fruits. In common usage, vegetable oil may refer exclusively to vegetable fats which are liquid at room temperature.
A triglyceride is an ester derived from glycerol and three fatty acids. Triglycerides are the main constituents of body fat in humans and other animals, as well as vegetable fat. They are also present in the blood to enable the bidirectional transference of adipose fat and blood glucose from the liver, and are a major component of human skin oils.
Cooking oil is plant, animal, or synthetic fat used in frying, baking, and other types of cooking. It is also used in food preparation and flavouring not involving heat, such as salad dressings and bread dips, and in this sense might be more accurately termed edible oil.
Vegetable oil may also refer to:
An essential oil is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid containing volatile chemical compounds from plants. Essential oils are also known as volatile oils, ethereal oils, aetherolea, or simply as the oil of the plant from which they were extracted, such as oil of clove. An essential oil is "essential" in the sense that it contains the "essence of" the plant's fragrance—the characteristic fragrance of the plant from which it is derived. The term essential used here does not mean indispensable as with the terms essential amino acid or essential fatty acid which are so called since they are nutritionally required by a given living organism. In contrast to fatty oils, essential oils typically evaporate completely without leaving a stain or residue.
Hydrogenation – meaning, to treat with hydrogen – is a chemical reaction between molecular hydrogen (H2) and another compound or element, usually in the presence of a catalyst such as nickel, palladium or platinum. The process is commonly employed to reduce or saturate organic compounds. Hydrogenation typically constitutes the addition of pairs of hydrogen atoms to a molecule, often an alkene. Catalysts are required for the reaction to be usable; non-catalytic hydrogenation takes place only at very high temperatures. Hydrogenation reduces double and triple bonds in hydrocarbons.
In chemistry, sparging, also known as gas flushing in metallurgy, is a technique which involves bubbling a gas through a liquid to remove dissolved gases or volatile components from the liquid. By Henry's law, the amount of dissolved gases in a liquid depend on the partial pressure of the gases exposed to the liquid. Sparging increases the gas-liquid interface and reduces the partial pressure of the dissolved gas outside the liquid by carrying it away. Many sparging processes such as solvent removal may be carried out using air, but to remove oxygen, or for sensitive solutions or molten metals, a chemically inert gas such as nitrogen, argon, or helium is used.
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In chemistry, particularly in biochemistry, a fatty acid is a carboxylic acid with a long aliphatic chain, which is either saturated or unsaturated. Most naturally occurring fatty acids have an unbranched chain of an even number of carbon atoms, from 4 to 28. Fatty acids are usually not found in organisms, but instead as three main classes of esters: triglycerides, phospholipids, and cholesterol esters. In any of these forms, fatty acids are both important dietary sources of fuel for animals and they are important structural components for cells.
Fat is one of the three main macronutrients, along with carbohydrate and protein. Fats molecules consist of primarily carbon and hydrogen atoms, thus they are all hydrocarbon molecules. Examples include cholesterol, phospholipids and triglycerides.
Animal fats and oils are lipid materials derived from animals. Physically, oils are liquid at room temperature, and fats are solid. Chemically, both fats and oils are composed of triglycerides. Although many animal parts and secretions may yield oil, in commercial practice, oil is extracted primarily from rendered tissue fats obtained from livestock animals like pigs, chickens and cows. Dairy products also yield popular animal fat and oil products such as cheese, butter, and milk.
Margarine is a spread used for flavoring, baking, and cooking, that was first made in France in 1869. It was created by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès in response to a challenge by Emperor Napoleon III to create a butter substitute from beef tallow for the armed forces and lower classes. First named oleomargarine from Latin for oleum and Greek for margarite, it was later named margarine.
Coconut oil, or copra oil, is an edible oil extracted from the kernel or meat of mature coconuts harvested from the coconut palm. It has various applications. Because of its high saturated fat content, it is slow to oxidize and, thus, resistant to rancidification, lasting up to six months at 24 °C (75 °F) without spoiling.
Trans fat, also called trans-unsaturated fatty acids or trans fatty acids, is a type of unsaturated fat that occurs in small amounts in nature, but became widely produced industrially from vegetable fats starting in the 1950s for use in margarine, snack food, packaged baked goods, and for frying fast food.
Shortening is any fat that is a solid at room temperature and used to make crumbly pastry and other food products. Although butter is solid at room temperature and is frequently used in making pastry, the term "shortening" seldom refers to butter, but is more closely related to margarine.
Biodiesel production is the process of producing the biofuel, biodiesel, through the chemical reactions transesterification and esterification. This involves vegetable or animal fats and oils being reacted with short-chain alcohols. The alcohols used should be of low molecular weight, ethanol being one of the most used for its low cost. However, greater conversions into biodiesel can be reached using methanol. Although the transesterification reaction can be catalyzed by either acids or bases the most common means of production is base-catalyzed transesterification. This path has lower reaction times and catalyst cost than those posed by acid catalysis. However, alkaline catalysis has the disadvantage of its high sensitivity to both water and free fatty acids present in the oils.
Crisco is a brand of shortening produced by The J.M. Smucker Company popular in the United States. Introduced in June 1911 by Procter & Gamble, it was the first shortening to be made entirely of vegetable oil (cottonseed). Additional products marketed by Smucker under the Crisco brand include a cooking spray, various olive oils, and other cooking oils, including canola, corn, peanut, olive, sunflower, and blended oils.
Soybean oil is a vegetable oil extracted from the seeds of the soybean. It is one of the most widely consumed cooking oils. As a drying oil, processed soybean oil is also used as a base for printing inks and oil paints.
Sunflower oil is the non-volatile oil pressed from the seeds of sunflower. Sunflower oil is commonly used in food as a frying oil, and in cosmetic formulations as an emollient. The world's total production of sunflower oil in 2014 was nearly 16 million tonnes, with Ukraine and Russia as the largest producers.
An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is a viscous liquid at ambient temperatures and is both hydrophobic and lipophilic. Oils have a high carbon and hydrogen content and are usually flammable and surface active.
Plant oils or vegetable oils are oils derived from plant sources, as opposed to animal fats or petroleum. There are three primary types of plant oil, differing both the means of extracting the relevant parts of the plant, and in the nature of the resulting oil:
Interesterified fat is a type of oil where the fatty acids have been moved from one triglyceride molecule to another. This is generally done to modify the melting point, slow rancidification and create an oil more suitable for deep frying or making margarine with good taste and low saturated fat content. It is not the same as partial hydrogenation which produces trans fatty acids, but interesterified fats used in the food industry can come from hydrogenated fat, for simplicity and frugality.
Lard is fat from a pig, in both its rendered and unrendered forms. It is a semi-soft white fat derived from fatty parts of the pig, with a high saturated fatty acid content and no trans fat. Rendering is by steaming, boiling, or dry heat. The culinary qualities of lard vary somewhat depending on the origin and processing method. At retail, refined lard is usually sold as paper-wrapped blocks.
Enzymatic Interesterification (EIE) is the catalytic reaction that occurs when an enzyme is introduced into oil and rearranges the fatty acids on the glycerol backbone of a triglyceride. Triglycerides are either liquid or solid at room temperature. The rearrangement of the fatty acids that occurs with enzymatic interesterification provides structure and functionality to triglycerides at room temperature. This process adjusts the melting properties, increasing functionality and plasticity in food production applications. One of five different ways of altering melting property profiles, enzymatic interesterification is unlike the more widely used partial hydrogenation method in that it produces no trans fatty acids and lowers saturated fat content.