A Continuous-Flow, Pilot-Scale Cottonseed Dehulling Process to Yield Intact Seed Meats

摘要

The development of new cotton varieties with gossypol-free seed has introduced a new consumable, high protein seed meat into the food industry. Current methods used to dehull cottonseed provide a low turnout of undamaged kernels that would be desirable for new market niches. The objective of the present research was to develop a continuous-flow, pilot-scale system for dehulling cottonseed to yield clean, undamaged kernels based on newly developed dehulling processes. The performance of the milling system with and without steam conditioning was evaluated. Pilot-scale, continuous-flow tests resulted in undamaged kernel yields of 67.9±3.0% (mean±95% confidence interval) during wet milling, comparable to results of previous batch processing and far exceeding yields of whole kernels from current milling techniques. During dry milling, the efficiency of the system to extract all possible kernel material was found to be 68±2.9%, but most of the resulting kernel material was in broken fragments between3.35 and 0.706 mm in diameter.