Soybean Oil

Soybean oil, extracted from the seeds of Glycine Max, is one of the most popular and consumed cooking oils. It provides further use as it is often used as a drying oil and even  as a base for printing inks and oil paints. Soybean oils are one of the most popular vegetable oils and are of a dark yellow or light green colour.

They firstly have to be cracked and then adjusted to attain the perfect moisture content in order to make the oil,. Heating the soybeans between 60°C and 88°C comes next, after this they are rolled into flakes and solvent-extracted with hexanes, leaving the oil to then be refined and blended for several applications and occasionally hydrogenated. Soybean oils can be sold in either a liquid or partially hydrogenated form as vegetable oils or sold as ingredients in a variety of food types. In the growing season in 2002-2003, 30 million tons of soybean oil was produced worldwide.

Soybeans have also been used as domestic items and were first supposedly used for this purpose in North China in the 11^th BC. Soybean is actually one the 5 main plants foods of China and it was said that the early production of soybean was localised in China until the war in 1894 to 1895 after which point the Japanese began to import soybean oil cake as a fertiliser. Soybeans began being shipped to European countries in around 1908, although the Europeans were well aware of soybeans in the early 1712 due to German botanists writing. The first mention of soybeans in the U.S was in around 1804 and at the time it was used as a forage crop as an alternative for harvesting seeds. In the current day Americans consume over 28 billion pounds of edible oils annually with soybean oils accounting for 65% of this amount.

Soybeans are legume native to Asia and are known to be an edible bean that is an efficient source of protein. Soybeans are also used in the production of several foods that include soybean oil, soy meal and other meat and dairy substitutes.