What do cookies, hazelnut unfold, muffins, cereal bars, pastries, frostings, margarine, and peanut butter all have in widespread?
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 applications to handle these challenges (resembling RSPO palm oil).
However, why did palm oil develop into such a standard oil within the first place?
This put up 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, perhaps delicate and chewy. Desserts are delicate and fluffy. Frostings are pipeable, peanut butter spreadable. Cereal bars are agency, hazelnut unfold is delicate.
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, resembling butter, olive oil, or lard, typically have extra specialised functions. 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 larger yields in comparison with different oil crops. A single hectare of palm oil manufacturing can produce 4 instances as a lot oil as the following highest-yielding crops, resembling sunflower & rapeseed. It might produce over ten instances as a lot as among the lower-yielding crops resembling olives and coconut.
One other key motive, and the one we’ll give attention to for the remainder of this text, is palm oil’s versatility. Relying on how palm oil is processed, it could behave like a liquid oil, or a stable fats. It’s what makes it appropriate for a lot of totally different merchandise.
The vital 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, perhaps 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 totally different than one made with sunflower oil.
Fats’s habits at particular temperatures is essential
When deciding on a fats, meals producers consider its habits throughout numerous temperatures. Is it stable, liquid, or someplace in between?
As an example, if you have to select a fats to make use of in a agency chocolatey product, it have to be stable at room temperature. However, you do need it to soften in your dosing gear, so it flows via 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 delicate to slice. Conversely, for a delicate, chewy cookie, you’d desire a softer fats, even perhaps one which’s liquid at room temperature.
When designing an ice cream, you’d desire a fats that doesn’t flip too exhausting within the freezer.
From a chemist’s perspective, fats and oils each consult with 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 example (although palm & coconut oil are exceptions). If it’s stable at room temperature, it’s known as a fats, assume 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 stable merchandise from palm oil.
That is as a result of composition of palm oil. Palm oil incorporates each liquid and stable elements at room temperature. This by itself is just not unusual for fat and oils. Nevertheless, what units palm oil aside is that there’s a large enough distinction between these elements to simply separate them into totally different fractions. Every ensuing palm oil product behaves fairly in another way.
It’s why you could find 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 shade 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 subsequent step is the place the magic occurs. The palm oil is break up into its totally different fractions in a course of known as fractionation. This course of in and by itself is just not 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, known as olein. It has a melting level of 18–20°C. As such, it’s liquid at any temperature above that. You should utilize it if you want a liquid oil in your product.
To stable
On the opposite finish, you’ll discover a fraction known as tremendous stearin. That is the toughest fats. It’s nonetheless (very) exhausting at temperatures under 40–45°C. You want temperatures of 65–70°C to fully soften this fats, making it appropriate for functions that require tougher 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 in another way. By mixing fractions, you may create a fair wider vary of merchandise. This provides producers a variety of oils to select from. They’ll use the one oil that works greatest for them.
Designing meals with palm oil
Meals producers have been searching for methods to ‘design’ fat for many years. Based mostly on dietary pointers, they typically desire to make use of ‘wholesome’ fat, the unsaturated type, constituted of vegetation. Nevertheless, 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 stable fats. Our shortbread cookies would flip right into a puddle if we’d simply use an oil (which we tried, see photograph under).
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 were modified to develop into extra stable. The method allowed producers to design the fats with simply the appropriate consistency. Nevertheless, the method of doing so leads to the formation of trans fat.
Over time, it has develop into clear that trans fat are decidedly unhealthy for people. So, as an alternative of creating merchandise more healthy through the use of these stable 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 appropriate habits. That’s the place palm oil stepped in. In lots of merchandise palm oil proved to be an incredible answer for this downside. Similar to partially hydrogenated fat, it may be ‘designed’ to the specified consistency and habits. However, not like partially hydrogenated fat, palm oil doesn’t have to 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 extremely secure. Palm oil is generally stable at room temperature and might 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 in addition the presence of antioxidants resembling tocotrienols (a kind of vitamin E).
For comparability, butter, a potential palm oil replacer, must be refrigerated throughout storage. That prices vitality 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 resembling butter. Butter’s consistency adjustments all year long, because the eating regimen of cows, who produce the milk to make the butter, adjustments as properly. In fact, palm oil is a pure product as properly, 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 likely to do when there’s a ‘gold rush’, lots of people see alternatives to earn some cash. Because of this, rainforests had been lower all the way down to allow the growth of palm oil farms and native employees weren’t handled properly. By now, after these preliminary ‘gold rush years’ a serious world initiative, RSPO (roundtable on sustainable palm oil), has ensured that increasingly more palm oil is grown and harvested in a sustainable method, for each the native communities in addition to for the surroundings.
Making cookies with palm oil vs. butter
So, what does this seem like in follow? Let’s take a look at some shortbread cookies.
As a shopper, it’s just about not possible to get your fingers on all these various kinds of palm oil. However, we wished 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 under, you may bake completely tremendous cookies by changing butter with palm fats. Take into account that we simply used whichever palm oil we may get our fingers on. Producers have much more selection. They’ll use the precise proper kind of palm oil for his or her software. For a tough crisp cookie, they’ll use a tougher fats which supplies that correct quantity of crispness. For a softer cookie, they’ll use a unique 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 have to be chilled within the fridge earlier than slicing it. The palm fats was agency sufficient at room temperature by itself. This is usually a big profit for producers. It would permit them to avoid wasting on refrigeration gear, saving each prices and vitality.
All in all, each cookies tasted nice, particularly after we added slightly 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 particular motive!
This put up is sponsored by What’s Palm Oil?. All opinions and experiments are my very own.
Sources
Chester Zoo, SUSTAINABLE palm oil – Every 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 totally different fractionation paths and their potential usages. Worldwide Journal of Meals Properties. 21. 10.1080/10942912.2018.1437632., hyperlink ; incorporates a easy graph illustrating the fractionation of palm oil
Hanna Ritchie, Palm oil, Our World in Information, 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, Purposes 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
