CONCENTRATING LEMON OIL LEADS TO A VISIT TO THE HOSPITAL!

the old saying goes that if all you have is lemons you make lemonade well that's not strictly true [Music] oh [Music] so another saying is waste not want not what got me looking into the area of essential oil extraction was a few months ago we were preparing for a party and we made a large quantity of fresh squeezed lemonade and when we were done everything smelled really wonderful but we had a bunch of these lemon skins left over and there wasn't anything we could really use them for so we ended up throwing them away and i've always had a little bit of a prejudice against essential oils simply because i thought of them as pseudoscience or kind of a hippie trippy thing but that's really not fair because the term essential oil doesn't mean essential for life or a needful thing what it really means is the essence of and so probably a better term to use for many of these oils is aromatic oils these are oils that have such a high vapor pressure or low boiling point that even at room temperature they produce enough vapor that you can smell them they're present in all citrus fruit they're present in a lot of botanicals like herbs and spices and peppers it's even present in fish that's why you can smell it although there's no way we're going to be putting a salmon fillet in our equipment i mean there are limits but nevertheless with respect to citrus fruits like this the oil is contained in the surface in the yellow part of the lemon called the zest but because it's contained within the fibrous structure of this skin you really can't smell it but do a little bit of damage a little bit of abrasion and burst open some of those cells and you can smell the strong scent of lemon so the best way for actually extracting this the way the pros do it is what's called cold pressing where they take the skins and they place them into these gothic machines that have pins and blades and rollers that completely rip apart all the cellular structure and exude or extrude the oil at near room temperature that's a big advantage because in a lot of these oils there are very temperature sensitive uh components and so you will lose a little bit of the properties of the lemons or the the essential oil by heating them most of it though will will survive the heating process and so there are other methods that you can use now one pretty common method is to extract the oil by soaking it in a very high grade alcohol this is 190 proof ethyl alcohol and we took these lemon peels and we placed them inside of this flask about two weeks ago and as you can see the color on the peels has really blanched and the liquid inside of here has become yellow as the oil has been extracted by the presence of the alcohol this is actually the the main component of an italian beverage called limoncella and what it consists of is just extracted lemon oil in alcohol a little bit of sugar and a little bit of water the aroma is absolutely fabulous it smells great for after the video but the problem you might have is you might want to extract the pure oil and not have it diluted in a lot of alcohol and that's why you can use steam or hot water to extract the oil and that's what we're going to be doing today now in order to facilitate that process nevertheless we're going to cut up the lemons and we're going to macerate them we're going to try to grind the skins up into the smallest possible particles this increases the surface area and the contact with the water and also decreases the distance between the surface of the lemon and the interior of each one of these little particles again facilitating extraction so we're going to set up a little bit of a assembly line here because we're going to be working with a lot of lemons let's get going now you can see i'm wearing gloves you really don't need to do that for contamination purposes we're going to be boiling this stuff and it's certainly not toxic but i've got a healing burn on one of my fingers and you mix lemon juice and a burn not good so that's why the gloves on me so we're going to get started now you want to go sure take them random lemon here don't cut your hand off trying now to okay that was a nice cut all right so now let's take this let's hope this works how it's supposed to it's not bad it could be worse yeah that's a nicely squeezed lemon yeah yeah wait wait we're fighting over the lemon that's pretty good right yeah that's a good lemon okay my turn and i'm just going to cut this up a little bit to make it easier to get it in the food processor [Applause] we have a production line back up here oh again another perfect lemon yeah who am i doing you're doing a wonderful job what do we got 115 to go mother oh boy yeah here's the paper towel right here before you keep bleeding does it hurt bad i'd rather just not show it though well yeah but you can put the gloves on you could always like use the excuse here's the thing you could actually pour some water over it just so you can get the lemon juice off of it sure just wait and let that stop bleeding and then we can we can get you a band-aid uh yeah i might do the banded thing first are you getting dizzy no no but it's it's it's pretty good yeah yeah let me see that for a sec it's like right yeah you're gonna need stitches all right i might i think you are going to need stitches this is right on the end yeah yep yep yep okay uh i might might i know you're a doctor but no no no it's a it's a close call but i think you need stitches okay well i'm gonna go with mite until i i definitely need them um keep going keep going and i'm just gonna um you want to sit down and no i'm not um rather you keep going and i'd rather finish at least this part right we could we could bring this to a conclusion and then we could die right okay so can you put pressure on that so that you don't bleed all right well yeah yeah yeah i'll be okay okay no no i'll be fine i can do this pretty quickly myself okay so finished doing all of the the cutting and the the macerating of the fruit and it took a little bit longer with the loss of my assistant but he's doing okay so a few more minutes but no big deal now you can see we made a great deal of lemon juice here and we'll filter this through a strainer and we'll put it in to some of these plastic jugs if we put about two thirds of this full and take advantage of the fact that we live in new england it's super cold outside put this outside overnight this will feel this will harden rock hard and then we'll put it in the freezer and we can store this for months and whenever we want fresh squeezed lemonade all we have to do is thaw this out add sugar and water to taste nothing goes to waste now the pulp that i have here in this bucket and this bucket contains all of the oil and so to get the oil out we're going to go ahead and use our brew house reflux still all right so here are our two buckets of mush and this is the reflux still that we're going to be using now this still we highlighted it and went through a lot of details about how to operate it the principles behind that in a video that we'll link below so that you can take a look at how to operate this reflux still but if you haven't seen that video i'll give you a quick overview of just what's going on in the basic components this is a 60 liter or 15 gallon pot of which you can use effectively about 40 liters or about 10 gallons because you never fill these all the way up to the top down near the bottom you'll see these two bands that are wrapped on the base and are supported by these clips these tensioning clips these band heaters are similar to what's called a drum heater or a tank heater that's used industrially for warming lubricants and solvents and the nice thing about it in this application is because they apply heat to a very large surface area which helps to minimize the chance of scorching anything inside in addition any of the particulates that are sitting in the pot tend to settle down toward the bottom normally if you're heating this with a hot plate or a burner all that heat has to go through those particulates and again it's more likely to scorch and the surface area here is far greater than say one of those immersion heaters that you use in a hot water heater that sticks in the side of the pot this works very very well each one of them is rated at 1500 watts and i find that in about 40 minutes we will heat up the 40 liters of liquid inside of here with both of these on theoretically you could control these using a variac or an auto transformer i've never found a need to do it if i want to turn the heat down i just unplug one of them and that's enough control the rest of the control is done up here now if you look toward the top here this is the reflux tower and this is the device that normally would contain these copper bubble plates in a reflux operation what these plates do is they create more condensation and vaporization loops that go up through the column to help to separate alcohol and water vapor as we are trying to do a reflux distillation in this case we don't need that because we're just going to be using this as a pot still just as a an evaporator and the reason these are made of copper is because in a lot of fermentations you generate a little bit of hydrogen sulfide which can give a kind of funky flavor to fermented beverages we don't have to worry about hydrogen sulfide here either so i've simply left these out of the setup because that's one less thing left to clean now if you look at the top here there is a reflux condenser up here the purpose of this in a reflux still is to produce a huge temperature gradient between the two ends of the tower enhancing that reflux operation and providing better separation i'm actually going to use this for about a half hour after we get this up to a boil because what it will do is retain all of the liquids and all the vapors in here and allow the churning action of the boiling to help to extract some of that oil before we begin to dump the liquid out this gives me a little higher percentage of oil in the water and reduces the bulk of the material that's going to be coming out of the top now once we turn this off and allow the vapor to go through here the thermometer will shoot way up to around 200 degrees fahrenheit and all of the vapor will go through this loop and down through the true condenser the distillation condenser and then it will be turned into liquid which then drips through this little port down into this funny glass device here which is called a water oil separator the reason this is so helpful is that when we do this separation about 95 to 97 of all of the liquid that comes out of here is water and so we would end up with a lot of volume of water at the end of the operation which would make it very cumbersome to do the final separation that we're going to do in the separatory funnel so the way this works is kind of neat we have a stop down here which is currently off and just simply allows you to drain the device and there is a little capacity of liquid at the bottom and there is a side port that is hooked up to this main tube here as the liquid fills this because the water is heavier it tends to sit toward the bottom and the oil tends to float on top as the level of liquids rise in here they also rise in the side port and eventually when the liquid gets up to this little side spigot here it is able to pour out but because this is in conjunction with the liquid at the bottom which means the water it's constantly draining water out while the layer of oil continues to thicken and thicken and thicken this can remove about 90 percent of the volume the unwanted volume and make the concentration later a lot more convenient the final thing i want to describe to you is the cooler this is a typical four cubic foot chest freezer and what we did with this is we sealed up some of the gaps between the steel panels in here with a one part silicone rtv aquarium sealant make it completely watertight and then filled this with about 120 liters of pure water turn this thing on about 36 hours ago and allowed it to freeze about two-thirds of that water into ice so we have an equilibrium between water and ice in this chest what's nice about that is that when we pump the water into the cooling system here as long as we have ice and water the water remains at exactly zero degrees celsius all the time which decreases the variability in setting the temperatures in the condensers to just controlling flow we don't have to worry about the temperature of the tap water or the lake or the radiator that may be located inside of the building in addition because the water is so cold zero degrees it means that the liquid that's coming out of here is refrigerated and very cold so anything that tends to vaporize easily like alcohol or aromatic oils doesn't get wasted by being sent into the room because it's coming out at a tepid temperature now some people have commented on this saying hey you could really boost the performance of this even higher if you put some salt in here create a brine solution it actually wouldn't help because the vast bulk of the energy that this is able to sink the the thermal energy is in the phase transition between the ice and the water there's a tremendous amount of energy that's required to change ice into water so even if we lowered the temperature a little bit by adding salt we wouldn't really increase the the cooling capacity of this over just simple ice and water this works very well so what we're going to do now is i'm going to disassemble this a little bit so that we can pour our mush buckets into here we'll get this thing warmed up and we'll start doing the process all right so we've been running for about an hour and 15 minutes this has started boiling and you can obviously see the dripping of the liquid in here we're going to let this run for about another 20 25 minutes and allow the oil to be extracted from the water in here then we'll shut off the cooling here and send all of the vapor up through here and down through here okay so it's been about an hour and 40 minutes and obviously you can see that this is boiling i'm going to go ahead and turn off the reflux condenser and we're going to get a lot of flow of liquid coming through here i put a small quantity of water pure water at the bottom here just so that we don't lose oil into the side port but despite the reflux condenser we're still getting a little bit of vapor coming through here so there's a couple of tiny little drops of oil floating on the top but that's going to increase substantially when i do this let's open up the condenser here to cool this off and turn off the reflux condenser so we're no longer cooling this off this temperature here was at about 170 degrees fahrenheit before i went ahead and closed this condenser so this temperature within a couple of minutes should start to rise pretty quickly up closer to about 200 212 fahrenheit for you metric people you're just going to have to do the conversion this is a fahrenheit thermometer so we'll give this a couple minutes and see if we start to get a little bit more vapor coming out of here take a look at the liquid flow here we used to be getting about one or two drops every few seconds it takes a little bit of time simply because there is a bit of thermal inertia just because there's a fair amount of water that stays in here even after we close the valve but the steam has a lot of heat in it so it doesn't take long for this to heat up pretty quickly 179 and i think you can start to see that the drops are beginning to come at a little bit higher frequency here this will continue to increase over about the next five or ten minutes and get to a pretty good flow rate all right as you can see this flow rate has increased substantially we're at about 208 degrees fahrenheit so just below the boiling point of water and you have a cloudy level up here which represents the oil and all the water below here which is in conjunction with this tube and which is draining into this bucket this is what we don't want here so we're going to let this go for a few more minutes and then we're going to go ahead and show you how to separate do the final separation all right so we've let this go for about two hours and you can start to see a little bit of the debris is actually making its way up into the column that's not a problem but you do get a lot of foaming and that's one of the reasons why you never fill these things all the way up if you look carefully at the oil water separator you can see that you've got a layer of water on the bottom here and a cloudy layer of oil above here now this is going to continue for a while i'm going to run this for a while but we don't need to run this any longer in order to be able to demonstrate the final separation step now what i'm going to do is drain off some of this water on the bottom we're going to get rid of this it's a little snug when it gets hot and when it gets cold now this is draining off the water because we're draining off from the bottom and you can see the layer of the oil dropping down here we don't need this so we can dispose of it it saves a little bit of space then what i'm going to do is take some of the mixed liquid demonstrate this process i'm going to drain everything out of here water and oil but it'll all go down and we'll just let this continue to fill up here now as you can see there's a cloudy layer of oil on top of the water and we want to get rid of that water and the easiest way to do that is to use what's called a separation funnel we're going to fill this up this is closed with the oil water mixture and immediately you can see on the bottom here that the water sinks down to the bottom because it's at a higher specific gravity the oil on top though i'll raise this up a little bit so you get a better view is still a little cloudy it's not completely free of water the reason for that is because of just the kinetic energy of the dropping the water and the mixing of the liquid you form these microscopic micron and nanometer size droplets of water that are suspended in the oil that's what gives it the cloudy color or the cloudy appearance the opalescence but gravity will win out and if we leave this in here closed to protect it for about five six hours you could leave it overnight it's not going to hurt anything eventually this liquid here will clear up completely and you'll end up with a liquid like you see in this erlenmeyer flask with the clear oil on top and the clear water on the bottom this is the clear oil that we want so with the separation funnel what makes that easy is that when we're ready to drain off the water we can drain it off when we get the last drop or two of water out of here we can then take the oil from the bottom and we've got a really pretty pure lemon oil essence of lemon oil essential oil and now what i'm going to show you how to do is how to use it so what are you going to be able to use these oils for primarily for cooking and bartending one of the advantages of the oil is that it's clear so if you're going to make a drink or a martini or something where you don't actually want to have the solid material the zest in it it's kind of nice to be able to take a perfectly clear oil and just take a little drop and put it on your finger and wrap it around a glass to add the flavor and the odor but you're not adding any kind of solids the other thing is predictability lemons come in a variety of sizes but they also come in a variety of different types and some lemons have a lot more oil in them than others so if a recipe for example calls for the zest of two lemons what does that really mean like two little lemons or one big greasy lemon you really don't know how to predict one of the nice things is that when you purify the oil the productivity of the lemons produces either more or less of the pure oil but the oil itself is the oil so if you're going to use it to say flavor a zorbe or cookies or a meringue and you use a certain number of drops you're always going to get predictably the same amount of oil and the same amount of flavor you can also use this to scent soaps i've never done that but you can use it also to scent candles as sort of a spin-off of our rocket series i learned a lot about different types of waxes and in order to make a scented wax one of the best waxes to use is a coconut wax which is a hydrogenated coconut oil or rapeseed wax the advantages is these waxes don't have any inherent scent so they're not going to modify your your scents but in addition they have a very low flash point and a very low melting point so when you form the wax pool on the top of the candle where all of the odor is coming from it's operating at a much lower temperature and some of these chemicals some of the oils in the essential oils series are very sensitive to heat so it's kind of nice that you can vaporize it without overheating them another thing you can do is when my kids were growing up they used to love using these things they called smellers they're you know these little cards that you can hang in a car or a stinky closet to add an scent or to hide sort of the stink and they come in a variety of different types of scents but you can make your own you take a piece of cardboard or a piece of paper stock put a couple of drops of your oil on there and it lends a lot of a lot of odor i found a really neat trick though is to use these soldering sponges these are used for soldering stations where you will put them inside of a soldering station you fill them with water to clean your soldering iron but if you cut them up they're a very flexible type of very absorbent sponge you can place this in the oil like this they will absorb the oil and after about an hour or two they're so absorbent the oil moves inside they won't make the surface your skin or anything they touch oily but they have a wonderful scent and they'll last a couple of weeks and if they run out you can go ahead and just re-dip it in the next essential oil you've made you can put it in your your salmon oil if you want to do that but the point is it's a nice convenient way to be able to use these oils now there's another issue and that is the economy of scale and i don't mean in terms of money but time the majority of the time that you're going to spend working on this is not related to the number of lemons or the amount of material the botanicals you use most of it is going to be the setup and the cleanup so it would have taken us probably about half as long to do 10 lemons as a hundred lemons so it's kind of nice to be able to do a large quantity and to be able to store it and storing this you have to be aware of a few different issues number one because the oils are aromatic they vaporize they evaporate so you want a bottle or a container that will be airtight now if you repurpose a lot of bottles you'll find that they have a gasket inside that's often made out of compressed paper maybe a little plastic liner if you get really good bottles or you specify you can get a bottle with a gasket made out of ptfe or polytetrofluoroethylene or in other words teflon they produce a much tighter airtight seal and you won't get your oil to evaporate into the air the other consideration is that the oil itself is very sensitive to light photo degradation is a real issue and in some of these delicate molecules the light can damage or essentially burn the oil and change the aroma and that effect is very much dependent on the wavelength of the light the shorter the wavelength the bluer the light the more damage it can do just take a couch put it in a sunny window and you know what happens to the the color of the couch or if you're a dye laser specialist you know what i mean ultraviolet and blue light will do a lot of damage to chemical compounds it's called photo degradation if you want to prevent that from happening and you only have say clear bottles one trick is just to put it in a dark space or wrap it up in aluminum foil another trick if you want to keep the oil out on a shelf or you can easily get at it you can use an amber or a blue tinted glass which prevents a lot of the bad light from getting through this is a uv flashlight as you can see it makes the cloth here the sizing and the cotton cloth fluoresce if you put a clear bottle in front of this you can see it does nothing really to the light but if you take an amber colored bottle and put it in front it completely blocks it so that's going to protect your your oils from photo degradation a lot better they come in blue and brown and they both work very well the next issue is oxidation oxygen will actually slowly burn your oils and you don't want oxygen to get on the oils one trick is to take a bottle because you can get them in a huge variety of sizes and make sure that when you fill it up you fill it right to the brim eliminating as much air space in there as possible that way when you close it down even though you've trapped some air and some oxygen in there the air is not catalytic it doesn't eat through the molecules like a pac-man effectively the oxygen is consumed so as soon as it damages a little bit of that oil the vast majority of it is protected from additional degradation now if you want to kick that up a notch you can do what's called nitrogen packing to eliminate all of the oxygen and there's a trick to doing that i'm going to show you how to do that right now now if you take a bottle of oil and you've filled it up and you place it inside of a food storage bag like this then loosen the cap don't take it off completely and place it in some sort of a support that will keep it from tipping over close up the food storage bag like this these things are sometimes pesky to get to join but if i can do it i really hate these little bags we'll bring that down like this and then just before you close this up take a small tube to a tank of nitrogen now not everybody has a tank of nitrogen around but this is an excuse for you to get one and finish closing up the bag around that tubing and then go ahead and begin flushing the inside of the bag with some nitrogen don't worry about the fact that some of it is going to leak out we want that to happen so you only need to leave this run for about 30 seconds to a minute we're going to use up about four liters of nitrogen but these tanks will contain several thousand liters of nitrogen so it uses very little but we've effectively totally flushed this air out and replaced it with dry nitrogen now the trick is take out the tube close up the bag and wait about 15 or 20 minutes to allow all of the gases to equilibrate even the lick the oxygen that might have dissolved in the oil has a chance to make its way out into the bag let's say that we've waited about 15 or 20 minutes here you could wait a little bit longer it doesn't really matter the next step is to take the bottle and to tighten the cap while it's still in the bag still protected now we open up the bag and we have nitrogen packed essential oil this is a little bit better than using the minimal you know volume technique that i showed you before but where this technique really shines is if you're going to be packaging something that isn't a liquid either a granular material or botanicals or beans or anything where you can't eliminate the volume by simply filling it up with liquid this is a great way to preserve the material a lot longer finally there's temperature in chemistry there's a general rule of thumb that the speed of a reaction the rate increases or doubles for every 10 degrees celsius that you warm the reactants so if we take this oil that's inside this container and we move it from a 20 degree celsius room to a refrigerator near zero degrees we've effectively cooled it off 10 degrees plus 10 degrees or effectively two times two or four times slowed the rate of the reaction preserving the material put it in a freezer and bring it down another you know 20 30 degrees celsius and we could preserve this for another 10 times as long so there's a way for you to be able to preserve this oil for an extraordinarily long period of time far longer than you're likely to store it before you use it up so this is a very easy technique it's a lot of fun to play around with and you can do this with obviously a number of different types of fruits and botanicals when we get into the summer we're going to take advantage of what we've got growing in the garden and try to extract some of those oils too so that should be a lot of fun and hopefully some of these techniques i've showed you are useful for other projects where you might involve lightweight chemistry principles if you found this video valuable please do us a favor and consider subscribing it really helps out the channel it's the best thing that you can do for us and if you have any kind of questions or comments or suggestions for future videos put them down in the comments below i read all of the comments and i try to answer as many questions as possible so thanks for spending your time with me i really appreciate it you take care and have a great evening [Music] you

Channel: Tech Ingredients

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Id: hZT6r1CC6hs

Length: 35min 6sec (2106 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022