Abstract

Soybean oil is industrially obtained upon hexane extraction. In biodiesel production, soybean oil is submitted to phospholipid removal in order to improve its quality before transesterification. An extraction process was employed to produce ethanolic oil-rich miscella, which can be directly transesterified to produce biodiesel without prior refining. We assessed the oxidative stability of the miscella and three other soybean oils, namely degummed, alkali-refined, and refined-bleached-deodorized (RBD) oil. In vitro antioxidant assays as well as the identification and quantification of tocopherols and isoflavones were also performed. Although hexane-extracted oils showed higher tocopherol contents than miscella, this latter sample and its direct biodiesel demonstrated superior stability in accelerated tests. Miscella also outperformed hexane-extracted oils in all in vitro assays. This behavior can be explained by the presence of phenolic compounds with higher affinity to ethanol than hexane, which was confirmed by the identification of isoflavones glycitein, genistein, and acetyldaidzin, found only in miscella. This study showed that the ethanolic extraction of soybean oil generated a highly stable lipid feedstock for biodiesel manufacture.