Sunday, January 31, 2010

Making cold-pressed vegetable oil with a hand-cranked expeller

Hi everyone! Long time no see, eh? OK well the truth of the matter is that my job basically sucks the life out of me these days, leaving me listless at the end of the day and no energy to do anything creative usually, especially not blogging. The light, however, has appeared at the end of the tunnel - Tommy is done with school in about 5 months. Woohoo!

Anyway, I got a brand new toy and been using it a bit over the last couple weeks. I've had so many people ask about it because it is sort of a unique item so I decided to go finally buy a stupid card reader for my digital camera so I could blog it, so here I am :)

As many of you know, I am on a mission to rid my life of as much dependency on society and whatnot as I can. In my case, this means getting the tools and especially acquiring the skills I would need to in order to live completely off-grid. Maybe by the time I'm 90 I'll know enough, but I doubt it. So my latest toy is the Piteba oil press. It's a hand-cranked expeller that can make vegetable oil from basically any nut or seed that has at least 25% oil. This means technically I could use it to make oil from walnuts, sunflowers, all the way to hemp seed and even cacao beans (making cocoat butter).

I'll photo blog it on my next post, but I have used it a few times and let me say that I have a new appreciation for the fact I can go to the store and buy a liter of vegetable oil for $2. I also have an especially great new appreciation for the flavor and quality of a freshly pressed oil... incredible.