Keyword: vanaspati

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.

Formulations based on interesterified blends of palm oil and its products (especially palm stearin) with a variety of other vegetable oils have been tested by PORIM with good results. All the tested samples were similar to the conventional hydrogenated vanaspati with respect to melting characteristics and physical appearance, including granulation and phase separation but most important, they were free of trans fatty acids.