Abstract

Chañar is a typical fruit of arid and semiarid regions of South America, commonly used to produce sweet honey-like syrup called “arrope” from its pulp. During the arrope production, the chañar almonds that contain elevated amount of oil are disposed as a residue. Thus, the aim of this study was to extract the chañar almond oil by supercritical fluid extraction evaluating the effect of temperature (40 and 60 °C) and pressure (20, 30 and 40 MPa) on the extraction yield and oil composition. The best condition to recover the chañar almond oil was 60 °C and 40 MPa which yielded 40 ± 1% of oil. At this condition was possible to recover the highest amounts of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, 363 ± 4 and 468 ± 13 mg/g of oil, respectively. The physicochemical characteristics of the chañar almond oil are in accordance with the standards for edible oils.