Studies on Processing and Analysis of Red Pepper Seed Oil

An attempt was made to remove red color and capsaicin which were contaminated in crude oil extracted from red pepper seeds with n-hexane. Both clay bleachidg and deodorization were responsible for the removal of red color. Clay bleaching was also the most effective for the removal of capsaicin, which was removed completely with 4 % clay. Capsaicin in oil was adsorbed onto the clay particles exponentially and it followed Freundlich equation : , where x is amount of capsaicin adsorbed (mg/ml), m is amount of clay used in bleaching (%) and c is amount of residual capsaicin (mg/ml). Neutral lipid of the seed oil consisted of 95.8 % triglyceride, 1.55 % sterol ester, 1.45 % monoglyceride, 0.78 % free fatty acids, 0.2 % diglycerides and 0.15 % sterol. Major components of fatty acids in the red pepper seed oil were linoleic acid (78.79 %), palmitic acid (15.27 %) and linolenic acid content was only 0.63 % by high performance liquid chromatography.