Article 01 · Fundamentals
The benefits of cold pressed oils
Cold pressing is not a marketing word. It describes a method: the seed is crushed slowly between mechanical surfaces — a wooden ghani or a screw press turning at low speed — and the oil is allowed to run out under pressure alone. No solvent touches it. No external heat is applied. The press does get warm from friction, but a slow press keeps that warmth low, and that single restraint is what everything else follows from.
Heat is efficient. It gets more oil out of the same seed, faster. Cold pressing gives up that yield on purpose — which is why a litre of it costs what it costs.
What survives the press
Vegetable oil is not only fat. Alongside the triglycerides sit small quantities of other things the seed made: tocopherols (the natural vitamin E family), phytosterols, phospholipids, carotenoids and the aromatic compounds that make groundnut oil smell like groundnut. Several of these are heat sensitive, and several are removed on purpose during industrial refining because they cloud the oil, colour it, or shorten its shelf life.
Keep the temperature down and skip the refining, and they stay. That is the whole proposition. It is also why an unrefined oil looks and behaves differently from a refined one:
- It has colour. Groundnut oil is properly golden, mustard oil is amber, flaxseed oil is deep gold. Refined oils are near colourless because bleaching earth has taken the colour out.
- It has smell and taste. A cold pressed mustard oil is pungent. A cold pressed sesame oil tastes of sesame. Deodorising, the last stage of refining, is designed to remove exactly this.
- It can be cloudy, and it can settle. Fine sediment at the bottom of the bottle is seed matter, not spoilage. Cold pressed coconut oil solidifies below about 24 °C — that is the fat behaving normally, not a fault.
The honest trade-offs
Because the natural compounds are still present, cold pressed oils generally smoke at a lower temperature than the refined version of the same seed, and they generally keep for less time. Mustard oil is the exception on smoke point; it stays high even unrefined. Everything else asks for a little more care: a cool dark cupboard, the cap closed, and buying a pack size you will finish in two or three months rather than a drum that sits open for a year.
A word on health claims. Cold pressed oil is still oil — it is roughly nine calories a gram whichever way it was pressed. The sensible case for it is that it is a whole, unadulterated food with its own flavour and its own naturally occurring micronutrients, used in ordinary quantity. Anyone selling you a cure in a bottle is selling you something else.
Why small batches matter
An unrefined oil carries the character of the seed it came from, so the grade of seed shows up in the bottle. At Nuova the seed is A1 grade, the press runs slow, and the batch is small enough that oil reaches you weeks — not seasons — after it was pressed. The cake left behind after pressing still holds protein and fibre, and goes out as cattle and poultry feed rather than waste.
