Tutorial: Make Your Own Avocado Oil

Last week we made our own Coconut Oil and made a tutorial, this week we made Avocado oil and have another tutorial for you!  
We use Avocado oil for so many things here, it’s in all of our lip products, in some of our hair care, bath bombs, lotion bars, face soaps, etc!  We use it a lot, and love it!  It only makes sense that we would want to understand how to make it.
Avocados are one of the best foods you can eat, as it is full of vitamins, fiber, potassium, and good monounsaturated fats.  I recommend finding creative ways to add them to your diet, since they are so good for you!  Cooking with your own avocado oil is one way to do it, and homemade virgin avocado oil is as good as it gets and tastes so good!

Things you need:
-Ripe Avocados (I used 5 small avocados)
-A knife
-A spoon
-2 bowls
-A fork
-A rubber spatula
-2 or 3 baking sheets
-An oven
-A plastic spatula or rice spoon
-Cheesecloth or fabric that is not woven too tightly

Step 1: Choose ripe avocados, they are perfect when you gently push into the flesh and they are soft but still have some firmness.  You don’t want them to be too soft, since they are likely bad and could be moldy inside.  You also do not want them to be too hard, or it is just too difficult to work with them.  Cut your avocado down the center long ways all the way around the pit, and then twist the avocado to separate the halves.

Step 2:  The pit should come out easily with a little squeeze on the side of the avocado.

Step 3: Scoop out that green goodness and put it into a big bowl.

Step 4: Grab your fork and start mashing the avocado, you want to mash up the chunks as much as possible.  A food processor would do the best job, but I did not feel like cleaning all those parts.  A fork does the job well enough!

Step 5: Get your baking sheets out and start spreading your avocado purée onto the sheets. You want to do it in a thin layer so that when we bake it, the water in the avocado will cook out faster.

Step 6: When it is all spread out, you are going to take your baking sheets and put them in the oven at the lowest temperature possible.  My oven went as low as 170 Fahrenheit.  We want a low temperature so that the avocado does not burn, and the flavor or the oil stays in tact.  We just want to dehydrate it, making essentially “avocado jerky”.  The warmth of the oven will also cause the oils from the avocado to start pulling away from the purée. It can take 2 or 3 hours to get the avocado to the perfect state of dehydration, depending on what temperature it is set at.  If you live in a hotter climate, you may even set the pans out into the hot sun, which would be a more traditional method of making this.  It’s October here in Pennsylvania, so that is definitely not happening.

Step 7: We want it to look something like this.  It’s perfectly fine if some of the globs are still bright green when you press them.  We don’t want it to be so dry that we can’t press the oil out.  If you pat the dehydrated purée and oil comes off onto your fingers, you are probably where you need to be.

Step 8:  Get your wooden spoon, spatula, or rice spatula (what I used), and start scraping the avocado from the tray.  This is how your scrapings should look, the scrapings should come off in small flakes, meaning they are likely not too dry.

If your scrapings look like the next photo (big huge flakes that are way too easy to scrape off), then they are way too dry.  I did not get a drop of oil from these, my hands could not squeeze them hard enough to get the oil out.  If I had a press, that would be a whole other story.  This pan was on the bottom of the oven and must have gotten the brunt of the heat, so keep an eye on all of your pans so they don’t get too dry.

Step 9: Take your viable scrapings and put them in your cheesecloth, go easy on yourself and don’t do all the scrapings at once; you will likely get more oil if you squeeze smaller bags.  If you don’t have cheesecloth (I didn’t), use a fabric that is not too tightly woven.  You want to be able to see space between each woven thread.  Have some extra fabric on the side in case your cloth breaks from all the intense hand pressing you will be doing.  Your hands will be messy and you don’t want to run around looking for something else that would work with oil all over your hands.

Step 10: Get squeezing!  I found the best way to do it is by twisting the bag as hard as you can.  It will take some force to get the first drops, but once you get it started it is a lot easier to keep it going.  

Check it out!  I got a good amount of oil, considering I could not press the avocados from one of the trays.  So 2 1/2 avocados can yield this beautiful light green oil!  I would have gotten more if I did not lose a tray, but “c’est la vie”.  You now don’t have to make the same mistake! 

Let me know if you have any questions, and please also feel free to share this with your family and friends!