Ingredient: Soya bean oil (Soybean oil)
Category: Oils
Season: All
In processing soya beans for oil extraction and subsequent soy flour production, selection of high quality, sound, clean, de-hulled yellow soybeans are very important.
Soybeans having a dark coloured seed coat, or even beans with a dark hilum will inadvertently leave dark specks in the flour, are undesirable for use in commercial food products.
All commercial soya beans in the United States are yellow or yellow brown.
To produce soya bean oil, the soya beans are cracked, adjusted for moisture content, rolled into flakes and solvent-extracted with commercial hexane.
The oil is then refined, blended for different applications, and sometimes hydrogenated.
Soybean oils, both liquid and partially hydrogenated, are exported abroad, sold as "vegetable oil," or end up in a wide variety of processed foods.
The remaining soya bean husks are used mainly as animal feed.
The major unsaturated fatty acids in soya bean oil triglycerides are 7% linolenic acid (C18:3); 51% linoleic acid (C-18:2); and 23% oleic acid(C-18:1). It also contains the saturated fatty acids 4%stearic acid and 10% palmitic acid.
Soya bean oil has a relatively high proportion, 7–10%, of oxidation prone linolenic acid, which is an undesirable property for continuous service, such as in a restaurant.
In the early nineties, Iowa State University developed soya bean oil with 1% linolenic acid in the oil.
Three companies, Monsanto, DuPont/Bunge, and Asoyia in 2004 introduced low linolenic, (C18:3; cis-9, cis-12, cis-15 octadecatrienoic acid) Roundup Ready soya beans.
In the past, hydrogenation was used to reduce the un-saturation in linolenic acid, but this produced the unnatural trans-fatty acid trans fat configuration, whereas in nature the configuration is cis.
In the 2002–2003 growing season, 30.6 million metric tons of soya bean oil were produced worldwide, constituting about half of worldwide edible vegetable oil production, and thirty percent of all fats and oils produced, including animal fats and oils derived from tropical plants.
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