CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil
obtained from the African oil palm tree (Elaeis guineensis), and it is most widely consumed in Nigeria. The oil is
reddish in colour because of its high content of beta-carotene and it is
relatively high in saturated fats and thus semi-solid at room temperature.
(Matthaus, 2007).
Palm oil is well known for its excellent
dietary energy source, good source of vitamin A and E, stability at high
temperature and relatively cheap vegetable oil source. It is an important
traditional source of food to the people indigenous to West Africa and other
parts of the world. Palm oil quality is generally subjective and depends
entirely on the demands of the ultimate consumer. (Badmus, 1990).
In Nigeria, the application of palm oil
in food depends on the food habits of the people. Traditionally, the oil is
used either for cooking or frying. Palm oil does not contain cholesterol
(Corley, 2009). It is a common cooking ingredient in the tropical belt of
Africa, South Asia and parts of Brazil. Its increasing use in the commercial
food industry in other parts of the world is buoyed by its low cost and high
oxidative stability (saturation) of the refined product when used for frying.
The use of palm oil in food products is often the focus of environmental
activist groups, due to it being documented as a cause of substantial and often
irreversible damage to the natural environment (Kruger et al., 2007). Palm oil has long been recognized in West African
countries, and is widely used as cooking oil.
The palm fruit is a drupe, prolate
spheroid in shape which varies between 20 to 50mm in length and could be as
large as 25mm in diameter, it is found in bunches that are attached to the
crown of the tree through a stalk (Purseglove, 1995).
The fruit pulp from where the oil is
obtained surrounds a nut, the shell of which another oil, the palm kernel oil
is obtained. Extraction of palm oil from
nuts involves field operations and factory or house operations. The field
processes include cutting ripe fruit bunches from the palm tree and carrying
the fresh fruit bunches and fallen loose fruits to the factory or house by
field workers while the factory or house processes involves digestion of the
fruit and squeezing palm oil out of the digested fruit pulp (Badmus, 1990).
Locally palm oil is produced by hand,
which involves the harvesting of the fruit, cooking the fruit, pounding the
fruit mortal and pestle, extracting the oil and
boiling it to let the water evaporate, then processing what is left in
order to collect the red colored oil (palm oil).
Since
palm oil contains more saturated fats than oil made from canola, corn, linseed,
soybeans, safflower and sunflowers, it can withstand extreme deep-frying heat
and resists oxidation. (Martin,1988).
This
has also contributed to the increase demand of palm oil in West African region.
Hence the trade of palm oil termed a lucrative business. (Edem, 2002).
European merchants trading with West
Africa occasionally purchased palm oil for use in Europe, but since the oil was
of a lower quality than Olive oil, palm oil remained rare outside West Africa
(Corley, 2009).
Palm oil became a highly sought after
commodity by British traders, for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery
during Britain’s industrial evolution, palm oil also formed the basis of soap
production, it also constituted the primary export of some West African
countries such as Ghana and Nigeria,
although this was overtaken by cocoa in 1880s. (Hartley, 1988).
The trade of red palm oil serves as good
and lucrative business for most local women. In most cases, merchants of this
oil bought it when it is cheap during its season and store it in different
storage conditions such as different containers at varying degree of
temperature without considering the oil quality deterioration that usually set
in over the period of storage. The oil is later sold when it is offseason, at a
time when it is very expensive so that they can make high profit. (Okogeri etal., 2006)
Orji (2006), observed that the
acceptability of palm oil in the international market is largely dependent on
the physiochemical properties of the oil at the time of purchase. It is against
this background that this study was designed to establish the effect of
processing method on the physic-chemical properties of palm oil.
1.1 JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY
Refined vegetable oil of high fluidity
has been in higher demand compared to those that congeal at room temperature.
Recently dieticians tends to recommend the use of less saturated oils stating
that the less saturated oils are more heart friendly. Since palm oil is one of
the main oils used in producing refined vegetable oil, it becomes necessary to
find ways of processing palm oil that will be of high fluidity and will not
congeal at room temperature. This is the motivation of this study.
However from mere observations, palm oil
produced by the cold/fermentation process usually congeals at room temperature
while the one produced by boiling of the fruits is usually molten (i.e. fluid)
at room temperature. Consequently as a first step to tackling the problem of
congealation of refined palm oil, the work intends to find how these two
methods of production of palm oil affects the physico-chemical characteristics
of the oil as well as its stability. At the end of the study, recommendation
will be made on how to produce palm oil for various industrial uses such as
refined vegetable oil, palm olein, palm stearin, margarine and other oil based
products.
1.2 OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
The main objective of this study was to
determine the effects of palm fruit processing method on the physico-chemical
properties of the palm oil.
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