Does everything have oil that can be extracted?

Factual Questions
1

Canola obviously does. As do olives. Safflower…yup. Fish…apparently. Can oil be extracted from anything?

In particular, I was thinking of cilantro. I love cilantro, and whilst cooking up a stir fry tonight (putting in the cilantro), I wondered if I could cook with cilantro oil. I went to the Web and found many recipes that talk about infusing oil with cilantro, but nothing about extracting oil from cilantro.

How bout it…does cilantro contain oil? Apples? Onion? People?

2

Well, there’s baby oil.

3

Not everything has oil; plants store fats for a number of reasons:

  • inside seeds for use as food by the developing seedling
  • inside or around seeds to protect the seed or facilitate dispersal (perhaps to provide buoyancy, waterproofing or thermal insulation.
  • around seeds to recruit the help of animals in dispersal (other foods such as carbohydrates and proteins are also used this way)

Aromatic oils are a different thing - these are typically present to deter animals (or certain classes of animals) from eating the plant or its seeds - of course humans ride roughshod over all of this and eat them anyway.

Aromatic oils can be extracted in their pure form by steam distillation, but for culinary purposes, infusion (by steeping parts of the plant in, say, olive oil) is more practical, as it results in a flavoured product that is more manageable than a pure essential oil.

4

Simply outstanding. :cool: