What do cookies, hazelnut unfold, muffins, cereal bars, pastries, frostings, margarine, and peanut butter all have in frequent?
They (might) include palm oil.
Palm oil has develop into a ubiquitous ingredient in lots of meals worldwide. Additionally in locations the place no palm tree will ever develop. The omnipresence of palm oil has led to main environmental & social challenges within the provide chain, leading to packages to handle these challenges (equivalent to RSPO palm oil).
However, why did palm oil develop into such a standard oil within the first place?
This submit is sponsored by What’s Palm Oil?. All opinions and experiments are my very own.
Palm oil is a particular oil
Cookies are crispy and brittle, possibly gentle and chewy. Desserts are gentle and fluffy. Frostings are pipeable, peanut butter spreadable. Cereal bars are agency, hazelnut unfold is gentle.
Regardless of their variations, they might all include appreciable quantities of palm oil. Only a few meals components are as versatile and as wide-spread as palm oil. Different fat, equivalent to butter, olive oil, or lard, typically have extra specialised purposes. You’d use butter in a cake, however not in peanut butter. Olive oil on a salad, however not in a cereal bar.
There are a few causes for this. Firstly, palm oil boasts considerably greater yields in comparison with different oil crops. A single hectare of palm oil manufacturing can produce 4 instances as a lot oil as the subsequent highest-yielding crops, equivalent to sunflower & rapeseed. It will probably produce over ten instances as a lot as a number of the lower-yielding crops equivalent to olives and coconut.
One other key cause, and the one we’ll deal with for the remainder of this text, is palm oil’s versatility. Relying on how palm oil is processed, it may behave like a liquid oil, or a strong fats. It’s what makes it appropriate for a lot of completely different merchandise.
The necessary function of fat & oils in meals
Fats performs a vital function in lots of meals. Ice cream with none fats, or fats replacer, is watery, and thinner. Simply evaluate a popsicle with a scoop of creamy gelato. Cookies with none fats develop into dry, like a cracker.
Even the kind of fats or oil you utilize impacts the feel, possibly additionally the colour or taste of your meals. A butter cookie has extra crunch than one made with rapeseed oil. An olive oil chocolate mousse is lighter than one made with cream. A cake made with butter tastes completely different than one made with sunflower oil.
Fats’s conduct at particular temperatures is essential
When deciding on a fats, meals producers consider its conduct throughout varied temperatures. Is it strong, liquid, or someplace in between?
As an example, if it’s good to select a fats to make use of in a agency chocolatey product, it should be strong at room temperature. However, you do need it to soften in your dosing gear, so it flows by correctly.
When slicing cookie dough to make cookies, you require a fats that’s agency on the slicing temperature. A liquid fats would make the dough too gentle to slice. Conversely, for a gentle, chewy cookie, you’d want a softer fats, even perhaps one which’s liquid at room temperature.
When designing an ice cream, you’d want a fats that doesn’t flip too arduous within the freezer.
From a chemist’s perspective, fats and oils each seek advice from the identical group of components. They’re each mixtures of triglycerides. Usually, if it’s liquid at room temperature, we name it an oil – olive or sunflower oil as an illustration (although palm & coconut oil are exceptions). If it’s strong at room temperature, it’s known as a fats, suppose lard, butter, or margarine.
Palm oil may be very versatile
So producers want to decide on their oils fastidiously. That’s the place palm oil’s ‘superpower’ is available in: it’s simple to make each liquid and strong merchandise from palm oil.
That is as a result of composition of palm oil. Palm oil comprises each liquid and strong elements at room temperature. This by itself shouldn’t be unusual for fat and oils. Nonetheless, what units palm oil aside is that there’s a sufficiently big distinction between these elements to simply separate them into completely different fractions. Every ensuing palm oil product behaves fairly otherwise.
It’s why you will discover palm oil in such a variety of merchandise. Builders merely use that ‘half’ of the oil that they should obtain their required product properties.
From orange palm oil to specialised fats
Freshly pressed from the fruit of a palm tree, palm oil is orange. The palm oil will get its orange colour from β-carotene (which turns into vitamin A in your physique), similar to oranges, carrots and tomatoes.
However, most meals that include palm oil shouldn’t be orange. It’s why most palm oil is bleached, to make a colorless fats. It’s additionally filtered to take away impurities and stripped of taste so it doesn’t affect the flavour of merchandise it’s added into. The ensuing oil is impartial and secure, however does include fewer of its authentic nutritional vitamins.
The following step is the place the magic occurs. The palm oil is cut up into its completely different fractions in a course of referred to as fractionation. This course of in and by itself shouldn’t be distinctive to palm oil. However, globally, palm oil is by far essentially the most fractionated fats.
From liquid (at room temperature)
On one finish of the spectrum, we find yourself with essentially the most liquid palm oil fraction, referred to as olein. It has a melting level of 18–20°C. As such, it’s liquid at any temperature above that. You should use it while you want a liquid oil in your product.
To strong
On the opposite finish, you’ll discover a fraction referred to as tremendous stearin. That is the toughest fats. It’s nonetheless (very) arduous at temperatures beneath 40–45°C. You want temperatures of 65–70°C to utterly soften this fats, making it appropriate for purposes that require more durable fat.
Mixing and matching fractions
In between these two extremes, there are a number of different palm oil fractions. All of them behave just a bit otherwise. By mixing fractions, you may create a fair wider vary of merchandise. This offers producers a variety of oils to select from. They’ll use the one oil that works finest for them.
Designing meals with palm oil
Meals producers have been on the lookout for methods to ‘design’ fat for many years. Based mostly on dietary pointers, they typically want to make use of ‘wholesome’ fat, the unsaturated sort, constituted of vegetation. Nonetheless, inherent to them being unsaturated, and thus wholesome, they’re additionally largely liquid at room temperature – consider olive, sunflower and rapeseed oil.
However, as we mentioned earlier than, for a lot of meals you want a strong fats. Our shortbread cookies would flip right into a puddle if we’d simply use an oil (which we tried, see photograph beneath).
From trans fat to palm
Till not too way back the answer most producers used was to make use of partially hydrogenated fat. These are liquid (unsaturated) fat which have been modified to develop into extra strong. The method allowed producers to design the fats with simply the precise consistency. Nonetheless, the method of doing so ends in the formation of trans fat.
Over time, it has develop into clear that trans fat are decidedly unhealthy for people. So, as a substitute of creating merchandise more healthy through the use of these strong unsaturated fat, the trans fat made them unhealthier. It’s why, by now, trans fat have largely been banned from meals globally.
However, meals makers nonetheless want these fat with the precise conduct. That’s the place palm oil stepped in. In lots of merchandise palm oil proved to be an incredible resolution for this drawback. Similar to partially hydrogenated fat, it may be ‘designed’ to the specified consistency and conduct. However, not like partially hydrogenated fat, palm oil doesn’t must be modified. It simply must be separated into fractions. Leading to a trans fats free ingredient.
Palm oil is secure
One other benefit of palm oil is that it is vitally secure. Palm oil is usually strong at room temperature and may typically be saved at room temperature for months, if not years, with out spoiling and oxidizing. The composition of triglycerides in palm oil makes it naturally secure, but additionally the presence of antioxidants equivalent to tocotrienols (a kind of vitamin E).
For comparability, butter, a potential palm oil replacer, must be refrigerated throughout storage. That prices power and cash. It’s another excuse producers might go for a palm oil.
Lastly, palm oil has a extra secure composition all year long, not like different fat equivalent to butter. Butter’s consistency adjustments all year long, for the reason that weight loss program of cows, who produce the milk to make the butter, adjustments as nicely. After all, palm oil is a pure product as nicely, however it’s extra constant, particularly the person fractions.
Sourcing Palm Oil Sustainably – RSPO
The surge in demand for palm oil resulted in main points within the provide chain. As we people are inclined to do when there’s a ‘gold rush’, lots of people see alternatives to earn some cash. In consequence, rainforests have been lower all the way down to allow the enlargement of palm oil farms and native employees weren’t handled nicely. By now, after these preliminary ‘gold rush years’ a significant international initiative, RSPO (roundtable on sustainable palm oil), has ensured that an increasing number of palm oil is grown and harvested in a sustainable method, for each the native communities in addition to for the setting.
Making cookies with palm oil vs. butter
So, what does this seem like in observe? Let’s take a look at some shortbread cookies.
As a client, it’s just about unimaginable to get your arms on all these various kinds of palm oil. Nonetheless, we needed to do a comparability of palm oil versus the fats that’s mostly utilized in baking: butter. So, we baked shortbread cookies with each butter and a palm oil product:
As you may see above and beneath, you may bake completely tremendous cookies by changing butter with palm fats. Needless to say we simply used whichever palm oil we might get our arms on. Producers have much more alternative. They’ll use the precise proper sort of palm oil for his or her software. For a tough crisp cookie, they’ll use a more durable fats which provides that correct amount of crispness. For a softer cookie, they’ll use a special mix.
As such, cookie builders can really ‘design’ their cookies the way in which they need.
One other benefit: no want for chilling the dough
When baking shortbread cookies with our palm oil, we seen that we didn’t have to relax the cookie dough, whereas the butter dough did must be chilled within the fridge earlier than chopping it. The palm fats was agency sufficient at room temperature by itself. This is usually a enormous profit for producers. It would enable them to save lots of on refrigeration gear, saving each prices and power.
All in all, each cookies tasted nice, particularly once we added somewhat trace of vanilla flavoring to make up for the blander palm oil style.
So subsequent time you discover ‘palm oil’ as one of many components in your product, know that it’s been put there for a selected cause!
This submit is sponsored by What’s Palm Oil?. All opinions and experiments are my very own.
Sources
Chester Zoo, SUSTAINABLE palm oil – Every little thing You Want To Know, hyperlink
Jin, Jun & Jie, Liang & Zheng, Liyou & Cheng, Min & Dan, Xie & Jin, Qingzhe & Wang, Xingguo. (2018). Traits of palm mid-fractions produced from completely different fractionation paths and their potential usages. Worldwide Journal of Meals Properties. 21. 10.1080/10942912.2018.1437632., hyperlink ; comprises a easy graph illustrating the fractionation of palm oil
Hanna Ritchie, Palm oil, Our World in Knowledge, Feb-4, 2021, hyperlink ; it is a nice data-based article on palm oil manufacturing.
RSPO, https://rspo.org/
Sen CK, Rink C, Khanna S. Palm oil-derived pure vitamin E alpha-tocotrienol in mind well being and illness. J Am Coll Nutr. 2010 Jun;29(3 Suppl):314S-323S. doi: 10.1080/07315724.2010.10719846. PMID: 20823491; PMCID: PMC3065441.
Science Direct, Olein, hyperlink
Teah Yau Kun, Functions and Benefits of Palm Specialty Fat, Malaysian Palm Oil Council, Jul-24, 2017, hyperlink
Fats, Oil Options, Ready Meals, hyperlink
WWF, 8 issues to find out about palm oil, hyperlink ; a easy clear overview of why palm oil might be present in nearly half of all packaged merchandise and the way it may be sourced sustainably
