Pepper seed oil production line
The commonly referred to as prickly ash oil, prickly ash seed oil, and prickly ash essential oil are completely different things. Extracted from pepper seeds by pressing or solvent extraction

　　 Prickly ash seed oil, and then refined into edible pepper seed oil. Zanthoxylum bungeanum essential oil is produced by organic solvent extraction or supercritical extraction of Zanthoxylum bungeanum. Generally, it cannot be eaten directly. It needs to be diluted into Zanthoxylum bungeanum oil in an appropriate proportion with edible vegetable oil before it can be used as a seasoning oil.

　　 pepper oil is mainly prepared by the following methods:

　　1. Oil soluble method, oil immersion method, oil shower method

　　 Oil-soluble method, oil-immersed method, and oil-drenched method are the traditional methods of producing pepper oil, which are used by most domestic pepper oil factories. The method is: directly put the pepper in the hot edible vegetable oil, cover and seal, or put the pepper in a container with a diameter smaller than the diameter of the pepper, and slowly pour the hot edible vegetable oil into the container to fry out its fragrance and make the effective ingredients Dissolve it in the oil to get the pepper oil.

　　The limitations of the above methods are relatively large, mainly because the oil temperature is not easy to grasp. If the temperature is too high, the aroma and numbness components in the pepper are easily volatile, decomposed and lost. If the oil temperature is too low, the water is not easy to separate, which will easily lead to the rancidity of the oil, and the active ingredients cannot be fully dissolved, and only part of it enters the oil, causing waste and high product costs, and lack of market competitiveness. Secondly, there are disadvantages such as low production efficiency, high labor intensity, and poor sanitary conditions.

　　 2. Solvent extraction method

　　 Use petroleum ether with a boiling point of 60-70°C as the solvent, and repeatedly extract Zanthoxylum bungeanum essential oil to obtain Zanthoxylum bungeanum essential oil, which is then heated and mixed with edible vegetable oil to produce Zanthoxylum bungeanum oil. This method also has drawbacks. First, the problem of solvent residues leads to impure product aromas. The second is that the volatilization of the solvent in the heating process increases the cost of the product invisibly and causes a certain degree of pollution to the atmospheric environment.

　　3. Supercritical CO2 extraction method

　　Using liquid CO2 to extract the effective ingredients in the pepper, it is the pepper essential oil, and then mixed with edible vegetable oil. This method is more advanced, and the quality of the pepper oil produced is better, but it has the following defects: First, during the pepper picking season, the amount of fresh pepper oil processed by this method is limited daily. The temperature of this method is 35-40°C, the extraction time is long, and the daily processing volume is not large, so this method is not suitable for large-scale production of pepper in the rush season. Second, when the method is used to extract fresh pepper, the pepper peel and the pepper seeds need to be crushed or pressed into pieces. Because the oil contained in the pepper seeds has a high acid value and has a bitter taste, it is easy to increase the acid value of the product and change the flavor. The third is that its production conditions and corresponding labor protection measures are strict and require expensive and specialized equipment, so the application of this method is limited.

　　 4. Squeezing method

　　 is divided into hot pressing method and improved cold pressing method. The hot pressing method can easily lead to a large loss of aroma and taste substances in Zanthoxylum bungeanum. At present, domestic manufacturers have used a similar physical cold pressing method to produce pepper oil.

　　 In addition, there are distillation methods and boiling methods to prepare pepper oil, but they have been eliminated.

　　 The acid value, volatile matter, color and other indicators of Zanthoxylum bungeanum oil are different due to the different origin, picking time, and production process.