Evaluation of size reduction and expansion on yield and quality of cumin (cuminum cyminum) seed oil Original Research Article

Cumin, one of the important seed spices has 3–4% volatile oil and about 15% fixed oil. Conventional grinding of cumin is associated with problems of temperature rise, caking, clogging of sieves and deterioration of quality due to loss of volatiles. Shortcomings of the conventional size reduction were obviated by flaking and the effect of flaking on the yield and quality of volatile oil was comparatively evaluated. For small batch size operations (200 g), oil yield was found to be the same (3.4%) for both ground and flaked samples. However, in the operations of larger batch, flakes resulted in significantly higher (3.3%) oil yield as compared to ground samples (2.8%) indicating the advantage of flaking over grinding. Aqueous portion of the distillate in both cases had equal proportion of volatile oil (0.2%). Flavour profiles of the volatile oils revealed that retention of lower boiling terpene compounds and character impact compound, cuminaldehyde were higher in oil obtained from flakes as compared to powder.