The process of sub-critical low temperature extraction of capsicum red pigment is divided into three steps: pretreatment, sub-critical extraction and despicy.
1. Pretreatment process
Pepper → cleaning → drying, seed removal → crushing → granulation → extraction process
Clean up: Purchased dried peppers generally contain a certain amount of impurities and a large number of pepper stalks, first remove impurities and pepper stalks. Drying and seed removal: drying facilitates seed removal, and seed removal can increase the content of unit pigment.
Crushing: Crushing can effectively destroy the organizational structure and physical form of pepper, improve the surface area of the material, and facilitate the diffusion of pigment molecules to the solvent during extraction. The particle size of the material after grinding is generally 40 ~ 60 mesh.
Granulation: The pepper powder is passed through the ring die granulator to create Φ4x8 rod-like particles.
2. Subcritical butane extraction process
The dark red paste extract was obtained by countercurrent extraction of the granulated pepper material for 5 times, the solvent ratio was 1:1.3 and the extraction temperature was 30-35 ℃. The meal after low temperature dissolving can be further processed into food products.
3. despicy
Paste extract is the total fat soluble component of capsicum, which mainly contains capsicum red pigment and capsaicin, which limits the application range of capsicum red pigment, so it is necessary to remove the spicy substance in capsicum red pigment. At present, the removal of chilli red pigment is mainly by liquid-liquid extraction. 76% (volume fraction) of ethanol was used as the despicing solvent and the pepper ointment was fully mixed to dissolve capsaicin in the ethanol phase, and then the density difference between the capsaicin pigment phase and the ethanol phase was centrifuged. The ointment was extracted by ethanol for several times, and the ethanol phase rich in capsaicin was concentrated and recovered to obtain capsaicin. The ointment after removing capsaicin was the capsaicin pigment. The main indexes of capsaicin pigment are: residual solubility of capsaicin pigment ≤20, water in capsaicin pigment ≤3%, yield of capsaicin pigment ≥9≥95%, color value (460nm)≥170~180. Out, acetone insoluble matter ≤ 3%.