So after a few days of figuring out how to extract the oil of Passionfruit Seeds, we've been pretty successful apparently.
Since the Philippines is a tropical country, drying the seeds were as easy as batting your eyelashes. Even though its the rainy season, a quick date with the morning and midday sun, the seeds were dry. What we were attempting is a cold-press method. When you're going natural, there's no way but cold-press, although its quite a tiresome method.
 |
| Leftover material after extraction |
After several attempts and a few liters of sweat, we've finally manage to squeeze out oil from the seeds. It was quite tough because the oil content of Passionfruit Seed is pretty low, about 16-18% only. That means if you have 1 kilo of seeds, you only get maximum 180 grams of precious oil (we got around 160).
But since what gets extracted isn't 100% oil (there are some fiber and other plant material that go with it), the yield becomes a bit lower after some impurities get removed. Its going to get smaller still if we will be refining, bleaching and deodorizing the oil, but we're not really that much interested in RBDs.
So this oil has been sitting in the bowl for a few hours already, and the impurities are starting to settle down already. We'll just have to siphon off the decanted oil and its ready to use. Sweet smelling Passionfruit Seed Oil, Cold-Pressed without any bleaching, refining or deodorizing.
Are we thinking of selling the oil? We're still thinking about it, especially when the manual expelling process is considered. Its quite a strain on the body. The expeller machine also showed signs of giving up, since it wasn't built to handle the Passionfruit Seeds. We're seriously considering, but we're not sure if we'd want to make more of the few grams we produced.
