Proces for refining fatty oils

A continuous process for steam-refining crude fatty oils or crude degummed fatty oils to remove free fatty acids, odoriferous material, and color bodies and thereby to produce a fully deodorized, high stability, bland, finished oil. Following degumming, if needed, the crude fatty oil is pretreated with phosphoric (or citric) acid while excluding air and oxygen, to react trace metals and other contaminants and then the oil is treated with absorptive clay under specified conditions of moisture, vacuum, and temperature to remove the trace metals and most of the color bodies from the oil. The filtered oil is then steam refined, under specified conditions of steam sparging, vacuum and temperature, to remove free fatty acids, odoriferous material, and other volatile non-fatty oil material, and to destroy certain color bodies. The process may also include fractionating and recovering, as separate products, the fatty acids and other stream-distilled material contained in the crude fatty oils.