Ucuuba Butter
INCI Virola Surinamensis Seed Butter. Also: Virola Surinamensis Seed Butter, Virola Sebifera Nut Oil, Ucuhuba Butter.
Published values
| Saponification value | 181.1–220 mg KOH/g |
| Used by the calculator | 200.6 mg KOH/g (midpoint) |
| SAP for NaOH | 0.1430 g/g |
| Iodine value | — |
| INS (SAP − IV) | — |
| Melting point | 42–53 °C |
| Unsaponifiable matter | — |
A bar made of 100 % Ucuuba Butter
Conventional qualities summed from the fatty-acid groups; a single-oil bar is a reference point, not a recipe.
The calculator uses the published value, because that is what the source says. If you are building a recipe with a lot of this ingredient, weigh the risk: at 15 % it would shift your lye by roughly that much for the portion of the batch it makes up. A certificate of analysis for your own lot settles it. The notes below record which documents were checked.
Fatty-acid profile
| Fatty acid | Published range, % | Used | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lauric acid | C12:0 · saturated | 16–20 | 18.0 |
| Myristic acid | C14:0 · saturated | 72–76 | 74.0 |
| Palmitic acid | C16:0 · saturated | 7–9 | 8.0 |
Where these numbers come from
Table 2 (SAP, directly titrated; iodine marked NA), Table 3 (GC-MS fatty acids for their specific lot), melting point in Results text, and discussion text (p.5-6) quoting the raw-material supplier's own spec range and flagging possible adulteration. Species tested: Virola sebifera. Open-access PDF read in full.
Producer page states SAP 220 mg KOH/g, melting point 53C, and seed fat approx. 70% trimyristin. No iodine value or full fatty-acid percentage table given.
Table 6 / Section 2.2: DSC-measured melting point of the ucuuba fat used, ~42-43C. This paper's own text states the fatty-acid composition it describes (myristic/lauric-dominant) is cited from an external source (Serra et al., not independently opened by me), not independently measured in this paper.
Two different Virola species/producers cover this id (both fit the brief's 'Virola surinamensis/sebifera'): Feitosa et al. 2021 (open access, read in full as a PDF) tested a Virola sebifera commercial lot from Belem, Brazil; Amazon Oil's producer page and Pereira et al. 2019 (Pharmaceutics, PMC6630981) both label their material Virola surinamensis. SAP range combines Feitosa's directly-titrated 181.10 +/- 2.38 mg KOH/g (Table 2, flagged by that paper as 'in accordance with their own specification') with Amazon Oil's stated producer spec of 220 mg KOH/g - no typical value is given because the two disagree and I cannot say which is more representative. Iodine value: left NULL. Feitosa et al. 2021 marked iodine 'NA' for ucuuba because no unsaturated fatty acids were detected by GC-MS in their sample (i.e. it tested as essentially 100% saturated); that same paper mentions in its discussion that 'its supplier report provided an iodine index of 14 g I2/100g for this butter, despite its fatty acid composition being 100% saturated' - the paper's own authors call this inconsistent, so I did not transcribe the 14 figure. Amazon Oil's producer page and Pereira et al. 2019 do not give an iodine value either. Fatty-acid composition uses the supplier-report range Feitosa et al. 2021 quotes in its discussion (p.5) - myristic 72-76%, lauric 16-20%, palmitic 7-9% - because it is corroborated by Amazon Oil's producer page (states ucuuba seeds are approx. 70% trimyristin, the triglyceride of myristic acid) and matches the broad direction of general secondary literature (myristic-dominant, not independently opened by me in full). Feitosa et al. 2021's OWN directly-measured GC-MS result for their specific lot was inverted: lauric 73.30%, myristic 11.18%, caprylic 11.63%, capric 3.80% - their discussion explicitly says this 'does not corroborate with the specifications provided in the supplier report' and separately flags their measured melting point (49C, see below) as possibly indicating 'contamination/adulteration' in that lot. Given that self-flagged doubt, the inverted GC-MS profile was NOT used as the primary fatty-acid figures here, but is recorded for transparency - a human merging this record should weigh both. Melting point range spans three directly-opened sources: Feitosa et al. 2021 measured 49 +/- 0.58C (their discussion notes this differs from Pardauil et al.'s reported 37C, itself not independently opened by me); Amazon Oil's producer page states 53C; Pereira et al. 2019 (Pharmaceutics) used/measured Tm approx. 42C by DSC (peak 42.99C, their Table 6) for their Virola surinamensis material. Unsaponifiable matter: not reported in any of the three opened sources - left null.
This record is part of the open ingredient database (ODbL). Found an error or a better primary source? The dataset is on GitHub; corrections with a document link are welcome.