Years ago I seem to recall Organic Gardening or other magazine having an article about making vegetable or seed oils at home with a small hand press. The article that I recall was somewhat experimental in nature, and they were working on a small home sized press. Can anyone tell me more about this? What magazine, issue, any other articles or books, etc.? I had something on the internet bookmarked but my computer burped and I lost all the bookmarks- and I think the bookmarked info was about commercially available equipment costing thousands of dollars. I'm more interested in something that could be made in a small machine shop, or even simpler.

Thanks.

-- Jim (jiminwis@yahoo.com), August 07, 1999

Answers

My family came to this country from a sizeable homestead in the Mediterranean. There they grew olives for the oil. Combine this personal experience with the UC Extension publications on extracting oil from olives and the following process works tolerably well.

Harvest the olives as they ripen. On the homestead they had hundreds of trees so there was always an abundance for processing. It is best to grind the olives, including the pits. The finer the grind the more oil harvested. Make up a "cake" by wrapping the ground olives in cheesecloth and put it into a press. Think heavy duty apple cider press...a framework against which a 5-10 ton bottle back can work to compress the cake. Put on some pressure and let the oil/juice come out and collect into containers. Later apply more pressure, building it up in steps to harvest the most oil possible. The oil/juice must be allowed to separate and the oil removed.

This fresh oil will be extremely bitter and must be washed 4-6 times with water to extract the bitterness. In the old country the oil was stored in stone tanks and did not turn rancid. Later on we tried concrete tanks, but rancidity was a problem. Today I would suggest food grade polyethylene tanks or jugs.

The health benefits of olive oil are many and I encourage all who can to use it exclusively. There may be other processes for other kinds of oil, but olive oil is what I know about. Good luck with the experimentation.

-- Nick (nikoda@pdqnet.com), August 07, 1999.

Nick, Thanks for the info. I think that pressing sunflower seeds or similar seeds for oil requires more pressure, and I'd like to find someone with experience like yours with other types of oil production.

-- Jim (jiminwis@yahoo.com), August 09, 1999.

The article was in Organic Gardening. I remember reading it and still have it. Unfortunately it is in my stack of 10 years worth of O.G. back issues. If you can find the month or even the year I could dig it up quickly, and mail you a copy. Otherwise this will wait for a slow winter day to get done. There are too many good articles in those back issues, and I get side tracked easy.

-- Kathy Dice (redfernfarm@lisco.com), August 29, 1999.

I'm curious what the process is for washing the olive oil to relieve it of its bitteress.

-- Nonny Octavis (bleedingwomb@hotmail.com), February 15, 2000.

I think that National Geographic Magazine recently had a feature article on pressing olive oil that covered each step.

-- Cornelius A. Van Milligen (CAVM@AOL.com), February 16, 2000.