Ingredient for the Week- Coconut Oil

Learning about Coconut Oil this week was pretty difficult because if you surf the web you'll find dozens of claims about its medicinal uses. If you search any of these sites yourself, be sure to take these claims with a grain of salt and remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Where does coconut oil come from?

Coconut oils are derived from the nuts of the coconut palm (cocos nucifera. The tree is highly productive averaging a figure of 60 nuts per year. The mature nuts have a hard shell surrounded by a thick, tough, fibrous husk called "coir." Inside the shell is the coconut water and the white "meat" from which coconut "milk" is expressed. The meat also holds the oil, a mixture of mostly saturated tri(acyl)glycerides used for cooking, for makingsoap and for various cosmetics and personal-care products. Harvesting the nut before maturity yields more water and a smaller quantity of softer, more edible meat.

From http://journeytoforever.org/energiaweb/cocoil.htm

What is Coconut Oil?

There are basically two types of oils from the coconut- oil made from Copra (or the dried meat of the coconut) and Virgin Coconut Oil- made from fresh meat.

Oil made from Copra:

In copra processing, developed in the 19th century, coconutmeat is scraped out of the shell, and then sun-dried. The resulting copra can be stored for a long time before extracting the oil. This was essential in the days when a copra trading ship might call at a remote island only three times per year to buy raw material for a rendering plant hundreds or thousands of miles away.
http://journeytoforever.org/energiaweb/cocoil.htm

Once the copra is delivered to the mill it is put in a corkscrew like press at temperatures over 200 degrees F (called cold pressing). The "cold pressed" oil is actually a rancid oil labeled "crude coconut oil - not fit for human consumption". The crude coconut oil is then refined, bleached and deodorized so that it can be sold as a food.
http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com/store/refined_coconut_oil.htm

What is refining?

The refining process is done by adding caustic soda to the oil. The main purpose of refining is to take care of free fatty acids which are actually caused by the oil becoming rancid prior to processing.
http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com/store/refined_coconut_oil.htm

What is bleaching?

Then the oil is bleached which is usually done by passing it through diatomaceous earth. The main purpose of the filtering is to make the crude coconut oil into a clear oil.
http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com/store/refined_coconut_oil.htm

What is deodorizing??

The last step is deodorizing, as this coconut oil still has a bad taste to it. The deodorizing process is done by heating the oil up quite hot and bubbling gas through it while a vacuum pulls off the vapors. In the end you have a tasteless, odorless, coconut oil.
http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com/store/refined_coconut_oil.htm

Virgin Coconut Oil:

Virgin Coconut Oil can only be achieved by using fresh coconut meat.. Chemicals and high heating are not used in further refining. There are currently two main processes of manufacturing Virgin Coconut Oil:

1. Quick drying of fresh coconut meat which is then used to press out the oil. Using this method, minimal heat is used to quick dry the coconut meat, and the oil is then pressed out via mechanical means.

2. Wet-milling. With this method the oil is extracted from fresh coconut meat without drying first. "Coconut milk" is expressed first by pressing. The oil is then further separated from the water. Methods which can be used to separate the oil from the water include boiling, fermentation, refrigeration, enzymes and mechanical centrifuge.

http://www.coconut-info.com/what_is_virgin_coconut_oil.htm