Homemade oil, trial 1
After
plugging away in the office a few hours a week for the last two months,
I've finally cleared out enough mouse nests, deleted enough junk, and
organized enough tools that I figured I deserved a treat --- putting
the oil
expeller to
work! I had a few jars of dried sunflower
seeds (still in
their hulls) leftover from the 2010 garden, so I decided they would be
my first experiment.
Taking Daddy's advice, I
used some kerosene we had in the barn instead of the lamp oil
recommended by the manufacturers. Big mistake! The impure
kerosene blackened the surface of the expeller so much that the dark
color made its way into the oil. Meanwhile, foul-smelling smoke
filled the air, and I had to open all of the windows to make expelling
possible.
Most
people would have stopped there and tried again once they bought lamp
oil, but I really wanted to see if the expeller worked, figuring I
could always mix the blackened oil back into the seed cake and feed it
all to the chickens. On my first try, the wick was too high,
causing a large flame that overheated the expeller tube and made oil
come out the seed cake end rather than out of the slit partway down the
expeller tube. After trimming the wick much lower, though, I was
able to get a seed cake to form in the end of the expeller and soon had
(black) oil dribbling out into my jar. All told, I spent maybe
half an hour expelling 5.5 cups of sunflower seeds and ended up with
around a quarter of a cup of oil.
The conclusion?
The Rajkumar oil expeller works as advertised. It's not terribly
fast, but I figure we could probably crank out a week's worth of oil
pretty easily in an hour or less, producing nutritious seed cake in the
process to feed to the chickens. Next experiment will involve
using actual lamp oil (and storebought sunflower seeds since I've run
out of the homegrown ones) to produce homemade oil good enough for a
taste test. Stay tuned!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Neither the oil nor the seed cake look very appetizing. Have you tried tasting the oil?
Luckily I cannot imagine what a mixture of sunflower seed oil and kerosene would taste like. That'll be one of life's experiences that I will not be sorry to miss.