Gourmet, now here's your heart's desire - Oleoresin!

by Afreeha Jawad

Ever heard of Oleoresin? It is a substance taken from spices which helps food industrialists add the necessary flavour to whatever products they manufacture. As large scale spice usage is an expensive exercise, Oleoresin taken from any spice item could be used in small quantities to get the required flavour.

Oleoresin will be made available by the Industrial Technology Institute (ITI), former CISIR, for any industrialist wanting the substance. All what one has to do is to take the required spice to ITI. Fifteen kilos is the machine - friendly weight.

Explaining all about this was Nalini Amerasinghe - ITI's Manager Process and Plant Engineering division. The needed spice - be it clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper or whatever - is dipped in a solvent for flavour extraction. Even alcohol is used at times as solvent.

When the alcohol is vaporised what remains is termed Oleoresin which liquid or solid state is determined by the spice.

For instance, celery and cinnamon give out Oleoresin in liquid form while nutmeg and pepper bring about its solidity.

The whole exercise is part of essential oils extractions which itself carries a recorded history starting 19th century. ITI's involvement with essential oils came in 1967 following analysis of such oils.

Distillation techniques were modernized in '98. What followed was the introduction of three distillation units for fine spices and four units for leaf oils. Such operational techniques when compared with traditional machinery helped a thirty percent yield increase.

Interestingly Amerasinghe recalls the essential oils role in the perfumery industry as having been closely connected with man. Archaeological findings reveal its presence in Persia, China and India.

Today essential oils are into beverages, toiletries, cosmetics, food items, varnishes, plastic goods, pharmaceuticals and so on.

Many transnational companies and developed nations are heavily dependant on Third World spices for industry servicing.

Accordingly essential oils could be the North South link in sharing technology and developmental efforts of poorer countries to benefit both divides.

According to Amerasinghe, the country's essential oil distillation units were owned by a handful of industrialists who could afford to spend on plant and machinery. Small farmers whose only income source were these essential oil bearing crops had to undergo financial difficulties when oil prices slumped and were compelled into hiring distillation plants for oil extraction.

Considering its plight state funds were injected into setting up three modern essential oil distillation units in three districts.

Such factories are now functioning in Kamburupitiya, Katuwana and Ambalangoda to extract cinnamon leaf/bark and citronella oils which serves around over 400 smallholders.

Three workshops were organized to educate these farmers and introduce the new technology.

As a result an additional income of around Rs. 30,000 per hectare is arrived at.