Groundnut Oil

Details

Groundnut oil pressed cold from Saurashtra nuts and filtered, never refined. It is thick, it smells of roasted groundnut and it carries that smell into the food. The obvious cheat is palmolein. Groundnut oil is one of the more expensive cooking oils in India and palmolein is one of the cheapest, it is close to tasteless, and at twenty or thirty percent it goes unnoticed, so blending it in is the standard trick. The Bellier turbidity test is the old and still reliable answer, because groundnut oil carries long-chain arachidic and behenic acids that palmolein does not, and those set the temperature at which the mixture clouds. A full fatty acid profile says the same thing in more detail. The risk nobody advertises is different and it belongs to this oil in particular. Aspergillus flavus grows on groundnut stored damp and produces aflatoxin, a liver carcinogen. Refined oil escapes it, because the alkali refining step destroys aflatoxin along with everything else in the oil. A cold-pressed unrefined oil has no such step, so the only defence is testing the nuts and testing the oil, and anyone selling unrefined groundnut oil without an aflatoxin number is asking you to take it on trust. Every lot here is tested at both ends.

• Aflatoxin tested on the nuts and again on the oil, held below 15 ppb
• No palmolein, palm oil or any other oil blended in, Bellier test and fatty acid profile per lot
• No solvent extraction and no hexane, pressed only
• No refining, no bleaching, no deodourising
• No added antioxidant and no TBHQ
• It smokes earlier than a refined oil, so keep the flame moderate and do not put the frying oil back in the bottle
• It is cloudy, it throws sediment and the smell is strong, and if anyone at your table has a peanut allergy this oil is not for you