What is vanaspati ?Can palm oil be used in its formulation?
Vanaspati is a homogenous blend of edible vegetable oils such as cottonseed oil, soybean oil, palm oil, rice-bran oil, maize oil and mahua oil, which are refined to remove impurities and colour, deodorized to remove odour in oils and hydrogenated to form a nutritious and pure cooking fat.Only vegetable oils are permitted in vanaspati.
Vanaspati is a cooking fat originally developed as an alternative to the traditional butter fat ghee. Vanaspati is semi solid and has a coarse granular structure at ambient temperature with crystals 1-2 mm in size, but is usually required to have a melting point of 37°C - 39° C. To the housewives, vanaspati offers distinct advantages. Food cooked in vanaspati has no characteristic flavour of edible oils. It has longer shelf-life and therefore, can be kept for a longer period. Some sweets and confectionery items of daily use which require a hard fat can only be made with vanaspati and not with liquid oils or ghee. Originally vanaspati was made from hydrogenated vegetable oils but hydrogenation is a fairly costly process and produces undesirable trans fatty acids.
Palm oil has similar physical characteristics to vanaspati such as melting point of about 36°C and semi-solid consistency at ambient temperature, and although it does not naturally develop the desired granular appearance, this can be improved by interesterification.
