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207       Sunflower seed oil

            (1)        Sunflower seed oil shall be edible oil obtained from the seeds of Helianthus annuus.

            (2)        Sunflower seed oil-

(a) shall have-

(i) a specific gravity (20°C/water at 20°C) of from 0.918 to 0.923;

(ii) a refractive index (40°C) of from 1.467 to 1.469;

(iii) a saponification value offrom 188 to 194 milligrams potassium hydroxide per gram; and

(iv) an iodine value of from 110 to 143; and

(b) shall not contain more than 15 g/kg of unsaponifiable matter.

On the Jelly Roll

Well it looks like we will be processing another batch of grapes next week. Peter is going to bring us another 100lbs or so of his fabulous Cab grapes.

Who is keeping us safe?

As I have been looking at various oil press designs I thought I would see what regulations are involved. The USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service, FSIS, sets the standards for such things in the US... I just wander how they pronounce the acronym... FSIS. 

For real information I found a great link that summarizes US and international standards: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FS119

A total nut

I guess I'm going to give the walnuts one more try... I suspect that the problem may be that the nut still had too high a water content. I left the nuts in the oven at 200 for a couple of hours last night... one more try.

Standing your ground on oil

It appears that you can find supportive evidence on pretty much any position with regards to healthy or unhealthy oils. For example:

Olive Oil is probabaly one of the worst things you could fry something in. Of course, you said you baked it...but, even then, olive oil should never be truly cooked. It gives off free radicals by the cupfull. Of course, Canola is worse...rapeseed...a relative of castor beans...poisonous as well as free radicals...very bad, or soy oil...even worse...no polyunsaturates, either...baaaad, bad, bad! I've been told that sesame oil, or sunflower oil are much more stable for cooking

or

Olive pomace oil and virgin olive oil are both highly monounsaturated oils and therefore resistant to oxidation and hydrogenation. Studies have shown oxidation and hydrogenation occurs to a lesser degree in olive oil than in other oils.  But in any case, the amount of hydrogenation is miniscule and no home cook would ever experience this problem.

I have been reading a lot of stuff on oils... personally I am no longer cooking with Olive Oil... but then I get to cook with freshly expressed home-made sunflower or peanut oil. There are some charts in earlier posts that compare various aspects of different oils.

It's nuts

I have now spent about 5 hours trying to press oil from the walnuts, with little success :-(... Walnut oil is "prized for it's light clarity"... not mine... it's pasty goop. The way it looks is one thing... but the taste is also disappointing. Maybe my pallet is too undeveloped (I did smoke for 25 years) but, to me, the flavor is too subtle, read lacking. This is meant to be a 'finishing' oil, good in salad dressings or drizzled over your cooked fish... I think the sunflower oil is far superior... at least in as much as it's much tastier. The sunflower oil is also a good cooking oil, which neither walnut nor olive oil are.  So it goes... I have probably used about 2/3 of the nuts I picked... now I have to decide what to do with the rest.

Roasted Goodness

WOW... the nuts roasted taste SOOO much better than raw... and the raw ones are very good. Much fuller, deeper flavor... yum!

Nut cracker... sweet

So Rebecca and I took about 7.5 lbs of the walnuts and opened them in about an hour. We discovered that if you give the nut a firm hit on the 'end' (the sharp end) with a hammer getting the nut out in large pieces, often even whole, is quite easy. We ended up with 3 lbs of nut meat and 4.5 lbs of shell... that's a better ratio than I was expecting.

Next I'm going to roast the nuts and then let them cool before extracting the oil... lets see how it goes.