ABSTRACT
The crude fats and oils recovered from oilseeds, fruits, nuts, and animal tissues can vary from pleasant-smelling products that contain few impurities to quite offensive-smelling, highly impure materials. Only a few of the crude fats and oils are suitable for edible purposes until they have been processed in some manner. Fortunately, researchers have developed processes for changing fats and oils to make them increasingly more useful to the food industry. Processing techniques allow us to refine them, make them flavorless and odorless, change the color, harden them, soften them, make them melt more slowly or rapidly, change the crystal habit, rearrange their molecular structure, and literally take them apart and put them back together again to suit our requirements of the moment. Advances in lipid processing technology during the past century have resulted in dramatic increases in the consumption of edible fats and oils. Innovations such as deodorization, hydrogenation, fractionation, and interesterification, along with improvements in other processes, have allowed the production of products that can satisfy demanding functional and nutritional requirements.
