How is argan oil made?
The oil is mostly handmade, and its extraction is slow and difficult. The fruit cannot be picked as the trees are too thorny, so the women have to wait for it to ripen and fall naturally and then rush to collect the fruit before the goats get to it. Once they have picked the fruit, it is laid out in the sun to dry. Then the fruit is peeled away and the hard shell of the nut is cracked to remove the almond shaped kernels inside. These are gently toasted and, once cooled, ground in a stone ‘rotary quern’, similar to a stone pestle and mortar. The ground kernels are then hand-mixed with water to form a sort of dough. This dough is then kneaded to extract the oil. To put the intensive labour involved to produce the oil into perspective, consider that 100 kilos of fresh argan fruit yields 35 kilos of dried. When peeled, this produces 16 kilos of nuts, which once broken open will generate 2.5 kilos of seeds. These are then pressed and will, finally, generate 1 litre of oil. Recently, mechani
