Spices and Condiments

Grading and Essential oil

Grading

Grading

• The Government of India and the ISI have prescribed fairly well- defined grades, popularly known as Agmark' grades, on the basis of important quality factors like colour, weight per unit volume (litre), size and percentage of 'empties', malformed, shrivelled and immature capsules.
  
• Separate specifications (about 33) have been laid for different qualities or types of cardamom such as Aleppey Green', `Coorg Green', 'Bleached', `Half Bleached', 'White' and 'Mixed' cardamoms.
Essential oil

• Cardamom oil is a greenish—yellow liquid with a spicy aromatic odour, somewhat pungent and faintly bitter at high concentrations.
  
• It is commercially produced by the steam distillation of the crushed capsules.
  
• The yield and organoleptic properties of the essential oil so obtained are dependent upon the type of spice used.
  
• In general, the spice from a recent harvest, which has not suffered excessive volatile- oil loss, should be employed in order to obtain a good yield.
  
• It has also been shown that distillation should be continued at least for 4 hours to produce the full ester content of the oil.
  
• The oil content is 3- 8%; up to 11% oil is available in the seeds while it rarely exceeds 1% in the husks.
Oleoresin

• Cardamom oleoresin is produced on a relatively small scale and little information is available on the methods of extraction employed by manufacturers.
  
• In solvent extractions, the yields are of the order of 10% and the content of volatile oil in the oleoresin is dependent upon the raw material and solvent used.
  
• Commercial cardamom oleoresins have been offered in the market with volatile oil contents ranging between 52 and 58%.