I have a lot of jars of herbs infusing at the moment. Nine jars of varying sizes, currently crammed into two of the largest-size slow cookers.
This is what happens when I get into herbalist mode.
Most of these are oils I use in our salves and other herbal products, and since I’ve got so many going at once I thought I might actually talk about what I’m doing with them.
Infusing herbs into oil is really very simple in principle. You put the herb into a carrier oil and leave it there long enough for the oil-soluble parts of the plant to make their way into the oil. Heat can be used to speed things along, although how much heat, for how long, and whether you want heat at all depends on what you’re working with.
The important bit there is oil-soluble.
Putting a herb in oil doesn’t magically put everything in the plant into the oil. Plants are full of different compounds and they behave differently. Some dissolve well in oils, some in water, some in alcohol, and some are just plain difficult.
Peppermint and spearmint don’t act the same way in oil infusions, as an example. Despite both being mint, peppermint becomes quickly overpowering in both mint flavour and scent with very little time in the oil bath, whereas spearmint does not. You can warm it for hours and it will still not infuse quite as deeply as peppermint, from my experience.
So when I’m deciding how I want to use a herb, one of the things I’m interested in is what I’m actually trying to get out of it.
That’s where my husband, “The Mad Scientist,” and his part of Mad Scientist Goods tend to sneak into the herbalist part.
I love traditional herbalism. There is an enormous amount of knowledge buried in hundreds or sometimes thousands of years of people using plants and figuring out what worked for them. But I also really like knowing why.
What is in this plant? Which constituents are associated with the traditional use? Are those constituents soluble in the thing I’m putting the herb into?
Will heat hurt them?
Would water work better? Alcohol? Oil? And sometimes the answer is that the old herbalists were onto something rather interesting.
Sometimes it’s that a particular traditional preparation probably wasn’t doing quite what people assumed it was doing. Either answer is useful.
For salves and similar things, infused oils are particularly handy because the oil isn’t just an extraction medium. It’s also part of the finished product. Once the infusion is ready, I can strain out the plant material and use the resulting oil directly when I’m making the salve.
Which brings us back to why there are currently jars everywhere.
Last week’s adventures included me hunting through the herb cupboard for comfrey.
The Mad Scientist claimed that I must have some categorical order to my herb cupboard, except that he has no idea what the categories are or what logic I used in setting it up. Honestly, the actual organisational system is approximately:
I fits, I sits.
I take no responsibility for this situation except for the inconvenient fact that I am responsible for this situation.
The herb cupboard is too small. I maintain that the proper solution is to rip it out and put shelves along the entire west wall of the laundry room.
The Mad Scientist has pointed out that the west wall has finite dimensions and reminds me that we have cats who like to knock down things on shelves with no doors.
Details.
In the meantime, he has apparently decided that my herbal activities require their own soundtrack:
🎵 We work with natural products, and we use the herbs historical,
From goldenrod to willow bark, in order categorical… 🎵
So that’s more or less what herbal infusions look like around here.
A bit of traditional herbalism, a bit of chemistry, a ridiculous number of jars, and absolutely no idea where I put the comfrey again.
~TheMadHerbalist
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