Purity well worth the effort

Camellia oil is pressed from the mature seeds of oil tea camellias. Oil tea camellias are members of the family Theaceae, and they are one of only four kinds of woody plants that produce a cooking oil.

From sprouting and planting, you need to wait patiently for four or five years before the plant will flower. And then you need to wait another ten months from pollination to harvesting. It’s not an easy process.

There are two basic types of oil-tea camellias in China: those planted for the oil alone, which include both large- and small-fruited varieties (Camellia oleifera and Camellia ten­ui­folia); and a second type, Camellia sinensis, whose leaves are also harvested for tea.

Camellia fruits are harvested once a year, and it’s important to harvest at exactly the right time. If you harvest too early, the seeds’ oil content will be low; too late, and the fruit will have dropped and grown moldy, so that no oil can be produced at all.

Producing camellia oil is a simple process.

The harvested seeds are first sun-dried for ten days, after which the outer layer of the shell will naturally separate from the seed. Then a shelling machine is used to remove the second layer. Before pressing the oil, the seeds are crushed into a powder, which is placed into a wooden pail to be sterilized by steaming. The wet powder is then removed and spread out to cool and dry before being formed into layered cakes, which are placed under 200‡300 kilograms of pressure to extract their oil.

“Camellia oil, sesame oil and peanut oil are all seed oils, while olive oil is the oil of a fruit’s flesh,” points out ­Hou. The biggest difference is that with seed oils you’ve got to first heat the seeds—both to kill germs and to help the seeds stick together, making it easier to extract the oils.

In China oils are currently extracted using either an expeller press or a hydraulic press.
Hou  stresses that Yamei makes special accommodations so as to be able to “cold press” its oils: “To keep the temperature below 60°C, every step of the process is done by hand, rather than being automated.”

Furthermore, with cold press extraction—as opposed to automated extraction with an expeller press—less of the oil is captured. Hou points out that ten kilos of camellia seeds only yield about one kilo of cold-pressed oil.

At Dakseed camellia oil extraction factory, they place great stress on cleanliness and on keeping the oil contaminant-free. The oil is transferred from the presses to the bottling machines in sealed pipelines so as to reduce the chance of contact with air pollutants, and people entering the factory have to wear dustproof clothing.