Vermont Soap Organics - Making Shea Butter in Ghana and Guinea

Making Shea Butter

Making Shea Butter in Ghana and Guinea

This is how they make artisanal, handmade shea butter.
Raw shea nuts are harvested off the ground, put into water and de-husked. The fleshy pulp is eaten, and the nuts are boiled for 30 minutes, then sundried 4-5 days. This is what they look like at this point:	The shells are cracked...
and winnowed....in Ghana a cloth was often used, in Guinea, a basket tray	Here are the dried kernels or almonds. Ghana has a tradition of baking the dried almonds. We saw less knowledge of baking the almonds in Guinea. This extra step kills the natural enzymes in the nut which break down the oils and shorten shelf life. The baked nuts will have a higher oil yield as well.
Here the almonds are being cracked with a little water and further dried on a piece of plastic. We would like to see this step done more efficiently using raised drying racks and then baking. In this demonstration, 1/3 of the nuts remained uncracked.	Three stages of shea production: Almonds waiting to be cracked (note the grass mixed in), the "coffee" or ground, dried almonds, and the finished product cooling solid.
After cracking and drying, the "coffee", as we called the twice ground kernels are then pounded to release the oil.	Water is added and the product is kneaded to the "chocolate" stage
More kneading...	and more kneading... small amounts of water are added along the way. The quality of hand kneaded shea butter cannot be matched by mechanical means.
When ready (30 to 90 minutes of kneading later), water is added and a vigorous back and forth hand motion releases the grey oil to the surface.	The oil is carefully scooped off...
and washed several times.	It now looks like clay, and is drained and put into a pot.
There it is cooked for about 15 minutes.	The impurities are scorched off (see edges of the pot), and the warm oil is decanted to a clean bowl and cooled. We would like to see the oil filtered through a clean cloth at this stage.
Cooling shea butter...	And some finished product!
In Northern Ghana this is how shea is sold.	In Upper Guinea large balls of shea are wrapped in Kapok leaves and tied.
Here is a well made drying rack from the Western Region of Ghana	And an excellent example of a multi use earth oven.
Shea Parklands, Ghana	The volunteers, at the end of a lot of miles.