Borneo tallow nut oil cake is the product resulting from the oil extraction of the fruit of Shorea stenoptera, a tropical tree from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Morphology
Shorea stenoptera is a tree with two genetic types: a large type that becomes 40 m or more in height and has thick branches extended upward, and a small type that is usually shorter than 20 m and has slender branchers hanging down (Suzuki, 1989). The bole is straight, up to 60-70 cm in diameter, with thin, low buttresses.The crown is conical to hemispherical in shape with pendulous branches. The leaves are simple, oblong, thickly leathery, 18-40 cm long × 8-22 cm broad. The fruits are acornlike, large (the largest in the Shorea genus), up to 45 g, equipped with winglike attachments that enable the nut to fall clear of the parent tree (Fern, 2021; Sosef, 1993; Talbot, 2015).
Uses
Shorea stenoptera is mainly used for the oil extracted from its seeds, which contain generally 43 to 61% oil though values as high as 70% have been reported (Bolton et al., 1924; Darmawan et al., 2021). This oil is highly saturated, rich in stearic acic, with a high melting point and solid at room temperature, which makes it a valued food ingredient, able to replace milk butter or cocoa butter, and an ingredient in cosmetics. One advantage of this fat is that its price is lower than cocoa butter. However, the commercial exploitation of Shorea stenoptera is made difficult by the fact that the tree flowers only every 6–7 years and availability can vary between 2000 and 25,000 t of nuts. Also, wild trees are often found on riverbanks and part of the production falls into the river as well as on the ground (Talbot, 2015). In river areas bamboo fences and booms are constructed to trap the fruits flowing down stream (Axtell et al., 1992).
In addition to its use as a substitute, local communities widely use it as a raw material for cooking oil and margarine (Darmawan et al., 2021). The fat is named Borneo tallow, tangkawang, false illipe butter or illipe butter. This latter name is a source of confusion: the European Directive on chocolate (EU, 2000) calls "illipe butter" the fat from Shorea species and authorizes its use as substitute for cocoa butter, but illipe is also the name of the tree Madhuca longifolia, which produces an oil also called mowhra fat (Talbot, 2015). In addition, other Shorea species (Shorea pinanga and Shorea seminis, and potentially Shorea macrophylla and Shorea mecistopteryx) yield tangkawang fat. The coproduct of the oil extraction can be fed to farm animals. The tree yields a valuable timber known as light red meranti (Fern, 2021; Darmawan et al., 2021; Sosef, 1993).
