How Vegetable Oil Is Actually Made, And Which Vegetables It Comes From

It would be easier to define vegetable oil based on what it is not. Vegetable oil is odorless, flavorless, and decidedly colorless beyond a pale, tepid green-beige. This culinary staple lives in your pantry (chances are it's lived there for a long time), but home cooks would probably be hard-pressed to explain what vegetable oil actually is. (We're here to help.)

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Almost always, products labeled as vegetable oil in the grocery store are made from 100% soybean oil. If it isn't made entirely from soybean oil, it's often a blend of soybean and corn oils. Still, the name "vegetable oil" is an umbrella term for a broad category. Canola, sunflower, avocado, olive, coconut, peanut, linseed, palm oil, and more are all technically vegetable oils. In fact, any fatty oil derived from nuts, seeds, fruits, or grains can be called a vegetable oil. By contrast, butter and lard (which are made from animal fats) are not vegetable oils. 

Thanks to its high smoke point at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, utilitarian vegetable oil is great for sauteing and frying. It also adds moisture to baked goods and salad dressings. Producing classic soybean-centric vegetable oil is a wildly efficient, multi-staged process designed to minimize pollutants, increase shelf stability, and achieve the most flavorless, colorless, odorless, sans-profile product possible. Its neutrality is the key to its versatility – and the painstaking product of meticulous processing. (Although, we even like to infuse our vegetable oil with peppers for a subtle, flavorful kick.)

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Vegetable oil is made from soybeans

After harvesting, the soybeans are cleaned to remove contaminants. To do this, the beans are run over magnets to draw off any metallic elements, then skinned and ground to increase the surface area per bean. It might seem like a lot of prep work, but modern processing techniques can extract as much as 98% of the bioavailable oils from the beans.

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From here, the ground soybeans go through a first initial pressing to extract the coarse oil, then a second pressing using solvent treatment to dissolve further oils. (The solvent agent is dissolved out of the oil and does not make it into the finished batch.) To refine, the oil is heated to 85 degrees Celsius, degummed with water or acid, filtered, steamed to deodorize, then finally packaged in bottles to ship out to stores. Some vegetable oils are subjected to even more intense processing like bleaching to achieve total neutrality.

Its synthesis is highly involved, to say the least. But, not only is this process commercially appealing, it's also necessary for vegetable oil's safe ingestion. According to one 2022 study published in The Scientific World Journal, "[A]part from virgin oils, crude oils cannot be consumed directly or incorporated into various food applications without technological treatments (refining). Indeed, crude oils like soybean ... oils must be purified or refined before consumption." As of August 2024, the FDA banned the use of brominated vegetable oil (vegetable oil modified with bromine, a stabilizer to prevent separating) in food.

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