ABSTRACT
In today’s modern nutrition, citrus fruits play an increasingly important role. All over the globe their pleasant, refreshing taste is closely associated with their nutritional value and healthy image. As a result, citrus products have developed into a major industrial factor within the last century (Swaine, 1988). Apart from the fresh fruit market, the production of juice and citrus by-products constitutes an important branch of the citrus industry. The downstream products of juice production and concentration, namely peel oils, essence oils, and aqueous essences, are valuable raw materials for the avor industry. The most important commercially available sources of citrus oils, the so-called cold-pressed peel oils, are the products of cold pressing processes applied during juice production. This chapter on concentrated citrus oils will focus on peel oils, as this raw material is commercially available for all citrus varieties in substantial amounts and, therefore, constitutes the quantitatively most important source for the production of concentrates. While concentrates of recovery oils and waterphases have encountered increasing commercial interest in the course of the past two decades, the concentration of petitgrain oils (water vapor distillates of leaves and twigs) and neroli oils (distillates of blossoms) has been less common, as these oils are mainly used as single-fold products on an industrial scale (Priest, 1981).
