The Art of Cold-Pressing: How We Craft Our Premium Oils at Oil Gallery
At Oil Gallery, we believe in creating oils that retain the natural goodness of seeds. Our process is designed to extract oils while maintaining their highest nutritional value, aroma, and flavor. This blog post outlines the steps we take to ensure the quality of every drop of oil we produce.
Our Equipment: Precision and Quality
We use a seed oil press manufactured in Germany, known for its engineering excellence. While it’s not an industrial press, it’s perfect for small-scale commercial production. The machine is built with surgical steel components that come into contact with the seeds, ensuring both hygiene and durability.
What makes this press ideal for our needs is the ability to fine-tune the extraction process. This means we can control both the speed and temperature of extraction. When producing cold-pressed oils, managing temperature is critical. High temperatures can degrade the oil’s natural nutrients, such as antioxidants, vitamins, and essential fatty acids. This is why we make sure the oil extraction happens at slow speeds to minimize heat generation.
Slow and Steady for Maximum Quality
Unlike industrial methods, which focus on high-speed extraction, we extract oils at the slowest possible speed. This careful approach ensures that the temperature remains low, keeping the oil’s delicate nutrients intact. The result is a cold-pressed oil that retains its natural color, aroma, and nutritional properties.
Settling the Oil
Once the oil is extracted, it is transferred to 50, 20, or 10-liter containers for the settling process. During this time, any naturally occurring sediment will separate, allowing the oil to remain clear and pure. Before we seal the container, we take a crucial step to preserve the freshness of our oils—we nitrogen seal it.
Nitrogen is an odorless, tasteless gas commonly used in the food industry to displace oxygen. By introducing nitrogen into the container before closing the lid, we ensure that oxygen is pushed out, preventing oxidation. This helps preserve the oil’s natural qualities, flavor, and nutrient profile. It’s all part of our commitment to keeping our oils as fresh as possible from the moment they’re pressed to when they reach your hands.
Sedimentation and Bottling: From Container to Bottle
After the oil has settled and the sediment has naturally separated, we move on to the bottling stage, ensuring that the oil reaches our customers at its peak quality. Depending on the type of oil, some batches undergo an additional mechanical filtration process before bottling. This is done using a 5-micron steel filter, which removes any remaining fine particles while preserving the oil’s integrity. The filtration ensures clarity for certain oils, giving them a smooth, refined appearance.
However, not all of our oils are filtered. For example, our Ethiopian Black Seed Oil is bottled unfiltered. After the settling process is complete, we go one step further—we intentionally add some of the sediment back into the bottles. This is because the sediment contains valuable nutrients and compounds that contribute to the oil’s potent health benefits. We believe this approach offers a richer, more authentic product for our customers, staying true to the traditional way of consuming black seed oil.