Dika Butter

For this oil alone at 5 % superfat, with pure sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or pure potassium hydroxide (KOH); in brackets, across the published range of its saponification value. KOH is usually sold at 90 %: divide by 0.9. For a whole recipe, open the calculator.

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The kernel fat of the dika nut, Irvingia gabonensis (bush mango, wild mango), a West and Central African tree whose kernels are sold in local markets as a soup thickener; the fat is pressed, boiled out or solvent-extracted from them and sold to cosmetics makers as dika butter. It is a lauric-myristic fat like coconut and babassu oil, but with more myristic than lauric acid and almost nothing unsaturated (about 97-98 % saturated acids), so it is hard at room temperature. SAPONIFICATION VALUE: two determinations seventy years apart agree. 246.0 mg KOH/g is the value in the 1976 analysis 'Oil-bearing plants of Zaire. II' (PlantFAdb dataset #14994, SOFA TAB_005262), printed beside a composition of C10:0 0.8, C12:0 36.3, C14:0 54.8, C16:0 5.5, C18:0 0.5, C18:1 1.6, C18:2 0.5 % and an oil content of 67.1 %. 244.6 is Lewkowitsch's analysis of a large sample of dika fat from seeds of Irvingia barteri, South Nigeria (Analyst 1905, p. 395), as quoted in Simmons and Appleton's Handbook of Soap Manufacture (1908): the handbook prints it as a saponification equivalent of 229.4, 'calculated by us from saponification value' (its footnote 9), and gives the conversion itself as 56,100 divided by the equivalent; the same table has iodine value 5.2, titre 34.8 C and unsaponifiable matter 0.73 %. Irvingia barteri Hook.f. is treated as a synonym of I. gabonensis. The record's own composition derives about 243 mg KOH/g, within 1.5 % of both published values. READ AND REJECTED: Matos et al. 2009 print saponification values for eight extracts of two seed lots (Tables 1 and 2; Soxhlet, Folch, Bligh and Dyer, press): Ouesso 199.50, 189.92, 204.17, 237.69 and Sibiti 198.93, 251.18, 277.40, 196.32 mg KOH/g. The pressed oils' own compositions (Table 4) are the same lauric-myristic fat and imply about 242; no fat spans 190 to 278, so none of those values is used. The 1984 PlantFAdb entry 'The characteristics indexes and the major fatty-acid components of oils from the less common oilseeds 1. Pentaclethra macrophylla and Irvingia gabonensis' (dataset #11699, SOFA TAB_005263) gives saponification value 243.0, iodine value 8.7 and acid value 13.6, which fit dika fat, but its fatty-acid row (lauric 5.7, myristic 21.2, palmitic 33.9, oleic 24.5 %) describes no lauric fat, so the entry supplies no field. IODINE VALUE: 4.1-4.9 across the eight Matos extracts (AOAC 993.20, Wijs; press 4.4 and 4.1) and Lewkowitsch's 5.2. The unsaturated acids in the profile account for only about 2 of it. FATTY ACIDS: min/max over five analyses, with no typical: Zaire 1976 (above); Gabon 1992, 'Fatty-acid and triglyceride composition of seeds from 5 trees of Gabon forest' (PlantFAdb #21233, SOFA TAB_000989: C12:0 35.0, C14:0 59.0, C16:0 5.0, C18:0 0.4, C18:1 0.6 %); Matos et al. 2009, pressed oils from Sibiti and Ouesso, Congo-Brazzaville (Table 4: C10:0 1.11 and 1.34, C12:0 36.60 and 39.37, C14:0 53.71 and 50.92, C16:0 5.23 and 4.97, C18:0 0.80 and 0.73, C18:1 1.82 and 1.97, C18:2 0.49 and 0.48 %); and Nangue et al. 2011, a hexane extract of kernels bought at Mfoundi market, Yaounde (Table 4: C10:0 1.54, C12:0 40.70, C14:0 49.05, C16:0 5.06, C18:0 2.38, C18:1 0.49 %, unidentified 0.78). Linoleic acid's minimum is 0 because two of the five list none. NOT USED: PlantFAdb's 1969 ('Fette und Lipoide'; its acids sum to 147 %) and 1984 ('Butter from plants': C8:0 3.1, C12:0 58.6, C14:0 33.4 %) entries, which share figures and put lauric above myristic against every other analysis; a 1990 entry ('Lipid composition of tropical seeds used in the Nigerian diet') whose profile, with 21 % linolenic acid, is not a lauric fat; and the two 2013 entries from 'Fatty acid composition of Irvingia gabonensis and Treculia africana seed lipids and phospholipids', which do not say which lipid class each describes. MELTING POINT: DSC fusion peak maxima, not slip or clear points: 36.08 C (Sibiti) and 39.66 C (Ouesso) for Matos's pressed oils (Table 5), and 40.26 C for fat separated with hot brine from seeds bought in Jos, Nigeria (Ogaji, Nan and Hoag 2012). The 1905 titre of 34.8 C is the solidification point of the split fatty acids, not a melting point. UNSAPONIFIABLE MATTER: 0.73 % is Lewkowitsch's single 1905 figure. NOT OPENED: Zoue et al. 2013 (Food Science and Technology International, 'Characterisation of a highly saturated Irvingia gabonensis seed kernel oil with unusual linolenic acid content'; paywalled) and 'Extraction and physicochemical composition of Irvingia gabonensis almond oil' (Separations 2022, 9(8):207; the publisher's site and its HAL copy both refused the connection). The INCI name and CAS number are CosIng's exact, active entry for Irvingia Gabonensis Kernel Butter (substance ID 56778, 'the fat obtained from the kernels of the Dika Tree, Irvingia gabonensis'), which gives no EC number; CosIng lists no saponified salt named for it.

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