How often do you use oil such as edible, olive, vegetable oil, and palm oil in your cooking? Many dishes that use oil such as fried, steak, and even soup dishes will still need oil to fry the spices before performing the whole cooking process. In other words, oil is a very essential part of our lives. However, commercial oil is designed to last long without spoiling easily. How do manufacturers do that? They have added artificial preservatives to make it last for years. The question is, are artificial preservatives safe?
It has long been believed that artificial preservatives are one of the main causes of cancer, heart problems, and other complex diseases. This is the sad reality of our time because even though we strive to be healthy, almost all the food we eat every day has preservatives. This is especially present in processed foods such as noodles, hotdogs, canned goods, and cooking oils as well, to name a few.
I compare the modern era and the era of our ancestors when processed foods were not used. Our ancestors lived longer than modern humans. They don't have complicated diseases like Cancer and others. In the time of our ancestors, there were natural preservatives that existed that they used to preserve food for a long time. One of them is salt as a natural preservative. If they have fresh fish and they want it to last a long time, they clean it and apply salt to it. Salted fish will not spoil for several weeks or months.
In terms of cooking, I remember my grandmother frying fish using her homemade pure coconut oil. I noticed that the fried fish did not spoil for several days. Because of that, my wife and I considered making pure coconut oil for us to use in cooking our dishes. This idea comes to my mind because we have six coconut trees with lots of fruit. Matured coconut fruits may be wasted if not used wisely. So, I took 15 mature coconut fruits of assorted sizes so that we could extract pure coconut oil. There are two ways to extract pure coconut oil, the cold process and the heated process. We use the heated process.
This is the procedure we apply:
1)Remove all of the husks of the coconut fruit.
2)Slice the coconut shell in two and grate the coconut meat using a manual grater or motorized grater if there is an available machine. In our case, we use a manual grater.
3)Extract the coconut milk using a fruit juice squeezer or a juice extractor device. In our case, we only use our bare hands.
4)Use a clean pan and apply heat with it. In our case, we use the most traditional way of using firewood.
5)Pour the extracted coconut milk into the pan.
6)Continuously apply heat and make sure that there's no residue sticking in the frying pan.
7)The residue will gradually solidify into granules and separate the oil.
8)Observe the changes in the colors of the oil and the residue.
9)When the color of the oil becomes yellowish and the residue becomes brown it means that the separation process is completed.
10)Using a fine strainer, remove the residues from the oil.
11)Let the oil cool. Then transfer the cooled coconut oil to a clean bottle or any container. Use a strainer to strain the excess residues and retain the pure coconut oil.
This is our process of making homemade pure coconut oil. From the 15 coconut fruits we used, we got 500 ml of pure coconut oil. The process took maybe 5 hours. If we buy edible oil at the store, 500 ml will probably cost us 40-50 pesos. It seems that our hard work is not worth compared to the resulting product. Although lower-priced edible oil is readily available, knowing that our processed oil can make our body healthy is far way better than buying cheap oil with bad side effects.
Another benefit of making homemade pure coconut oil is the residue that is also delicious and nutritious. Our son loves it very much.
My fellow Hivers that's all I can share for this blog. Thank you for your support.