Cottonseed Oil

Crude cottonseed oil is dark, and the pigments responsible are bound up with the gossypol the seed carries. Refining — degumming, neutralising, bleaching, and deodorising in the conventional sequence — addresses both together: the steps that lighten the oil are the steps that remove gossypol. This is why the food status of cottonseed oil is a matter of refining having been done, and why crude cottonseed oil is a refiner’s raw material rather than a food article.

Cottonseed oil also contains waxes and is commonly winterised for uses where clouding at low temperature would be a defect, in the same manner as sunflower oil.

• Food — commercial deep frying, where oxidative stability is valued
• Food — snack food manufacture, baked goods, and shortenings
• Food — bottled cooking and salad oil in some markets
• Industrial — a minor outlet in soaps and oleochemicals

Its position is that of a specialty-scale commodity oil: significant where cotton is crushed, largely absent where it is not, because supply follows lint production rather than oil demand.

Free fatty acid content, colour, moisture and impurities, and wax content describe the traded oil, and the refining cost of a crude parcel is substantially a function of its colour and free fatty acid load — both inherited from how the seed was handled between the gin and the crusher. Seed that sat wet in a pile yields oil that costs more to refine. It ships in bulk tanks and packed form, with tank cleanliness and cargo history conditions of acceptance.