Vegetable oil. Refined or unrefined What better and more useful?


The fact that vegetable oils are good for you, we know even a child. Unlike recent years, now in stores you can find various products. That's good, of course, but among the many oils to choose only one account. What?

The main difference between oils produced from the same plant material, the degree of purification. Available as a refined, ie purified by several steps of the technological process, as well as crude oil, which is limited by mechanical cleaning filtration. Argued that refined useless for health, in contrast to conventional oils, unrefined. Is it really?

The usefulness of vegetable oil is determined mainly by its zhirokislotnym composition. So the composition and the ratio of fats and acids in the refining process does not change, therefore, if oil is useless - that anyone, if useful - that regardless of the degree of purification.

Why then refine? The main requirement for refined oil - impersonal, neutral taste. Fans of unrefined varieties, probably now have rubbed their hands - well here and said who should be tasteless sunflower oil, which does not smell like sunflower seeds? Let's not jump to conclusions.

For salads and other dishes, when the oil can be used in the cold as possible, after treatment, are not very much and need. Oil in this case is not simply additive, but an additional flavor component. But even in such cases, you can find many recipes where the main ingredient just do not need a side taste.

And it is totally different picture is, if the oil used for cooking. Excess moisture in the unrefined oil is high foaming. It is the lack of which is visible to the naked eye. In addition, refining removes oil substances impair the quality and taste of food when heated, such as some phospholipids.

Food industry uses two ways of refining - using physical adsorbents, and chemical, based on the interaction of oil with alkali. The second method is more common. Its use is already 150 years, technology has been tested both by the high production efficiency, and by the quality control of the final product.

Do not be afraid that the composition of refined sunflower oil on the table will get some kind of harmful ingredients. For alkali treatment is used only allowed for contact with food. After processing the oil is thoroughly washed, in the final product leaves no traces of foreign chemicals.

In addition to refining the taste changes a parameter of oil, as the point of fuming or temperature smoke generation. For example, if unrefined sunflower oil, it is 107 degrees, then refined - is 232, and a refined rapeseed - 240 degrees Celsius.

You have to understand that talking about the temperature of oil in the cooking process is possible only with certain reservations. The layer in contact with bottom of a hot frying pan, can be warmed to 300 degrees when the temperature at the surface of oil barely reach half the specified value. Still fuming point can serve as a guide when choosing species and varieties of vegetable oil. How - a little later.