Pressed cold. Nothing added, nothing taken.
Commodity peanut oil is heated, solvent-washed, bleached and deodorised into something that tastes of nothing. Annadhara skips all four steps, and gives up yield to do it.
- <40°C
- Peak press temperature
Five stages, done differently
At each stage the refiner takes the faster option. It raises yield and shelf life, and it takes something out of the bottle.
| Stage | Commodity refining | Annadhara |
|---|---|---|
| Heat | Pressed hot, with the seed conditioned well above 100°C for maximum yield | Held below 40°C, accepting a lower yield |
| Extraction | Hexane solvent washes the remaining oil from the cake | Mechanical press only, no solvent contact |
| Bleaching | Clay filtration strips colour and carotenoids | None — the colour is the oil’s own |
| Deodorising | Steam-stripped to a neutral, odourless product | None — the aroma is the point |
| Filtration | Pressure-filtered in minutes | Gravity-settled over several days |
You can tell immediately
Open a bottle of refined peanut oil and you smell nothing at all. That absence is the product of four industrial processes — and it is what most people now assume peanut oil smells like.
- Aroma
- Roasted, nuttyNever deodorised
- Colour
- Deep amberNever bleached
- Texture
- Full-bodiedUnstripped lipids
- Smoke point
- 160°CEveryday Indian cooking
The oil was already there. Everyone else sells it off.
Annadhara did not start as a business plan. It started as a byproduct problem. Pressing peanuts to make protein powder releases a very large amount of oil, and the default in this industry is to sell that oil into the commodity market, where it gets refined into the neutral product on every supermarket shelf.
That oil has been nowhere near a solvent, and the press that released it never went above 40°C. Refining it would have been the profitable, obvious thing to do — and it would have destroyed the one quality that made it worth keeping.
So we built a second brand around it instead, using a German cold-press held below 40°C and a filtration process that is mostly just gravity and patience.