Extracting the spicy Chemical in black pepper

okay so this is a new series called edible chem where I'll be using only food grade supplies and clean glassware at the end I should be able to taste or eat what I make the purpose of the series is to explore the production of some of the chemicals that are used in our foods and as supplements even though the stuff that I produce should be food grade this video should be treated as entertainment purposes only and I really don't encourage anyone to recreate what they see if you make mistake you could potentially poison yourself anyway with the disclaimer done we can move on to the actual video peppering and its isomer Chaves een are responsible for the spiciness of black pepper it works by acting on the protein receptors trpv1 and TRP v2 which normally sends heat these receptors are found on nerve cells and when they're bound and activated by peppering it tricks the brain into thinking it's sensing heat peppering isn't the only molecule that does this and there's two other major ones which are actually a lot more potent capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate capsaicin is found in chili peppers and a low isothiocyanate is found in horseradish and wasabi I plan to make a video on each of these sometime in the future another interesting thing about peppering is that it can inhibit the breakdown of certain xenobiotics xenobiotics are basically just molecules that don't occur naturally in your body and it's most often referring to things like drugs or pollutants so if pitting is ingested it can inhibit the breakdown of certain things and make them more effective a good example of this is curcumin which is found in turmeric curcumin has a lot of potentially beneficial effects but unfortunately it's broken down by the liver way too quickly and barely any at all makes it into the bloodstream to counteract this it's often coupled with peppering which inhibits the enzymes enough that some of the curcumin actually makes it so today I'm going to be extracting peppering from regular black pepper the classic way of doing this requires repeated solvent washings which is both wasteful and labor-intensive to help me out because I'm lazy I've decided to use a socket extractor which will allow me to do less work and use less solvent the soxhlet extractor is actually a really cool piece of glassware and I'll explain exactly how it works later in the video in terms of supplies I just needed three things the pepper itself potassium hydroxide and isopropyl alcohol both the potassium hydroxide and the isopropyl alcohol are food grade the first thing that I need to do is crush the pepper so I use a coffee grinder it's important not to crush it too much though because if the powder is too fine the socks of extractor isn't going to drain properly I really thought I could get away with crushing it to a fine powder like you see here but it ended up being a total failure what you really want is something like this which is being crushed but it's still somewhat granular I didn't do it but before moving on it might be a good idea to pass the powder through something like a strainer to get rid of the larger pieces I set up the socks hood extractor and I slide a few pieces of cotton to the bottom at the bottom of the extraction chamber there's a hole that leads to the siphon tube and it's really important that the cotton covers this it's also important not to pack the cotton too tightly otherwise things won't drain properly once the cotton has been placed I pour in the chopped up pepper I then place another cotton ball on top I add a condenser above the extractor and I turn on the water pump this entire apparatus is then attached to a flask that's being loaded with isopropyl alcohol I set up a stir plate at a heating mantle and I'm pretty much ready to get things started the heating and stirring is turned on and I bring the alcohol to a boil as the alcohol boils you can see the hot vapor traveling up and condensing on the walls of the glass the hot vapor will slowly travel up the glass and it will eventually make it to the top when it does it goes into the condenser which turns it back into a liquid the now liquid but still hot isopropyl alcohol is dripped onto the pepper as the process continues the extraction chamber will slowly fill up with alcohol I've turned the extractor to the side so you can get a better idea as to what's going on as the extraction chamber is filled with solvent some of the liquid is pushed out through the bottom and into the siphon tube the level of solvent in the siphon should be about the same as the level in the extraction chamber as more solvent is added the level will continue to rise until it eventually gets to the top of the tube once it makes it past the bend gravity will take over and all of the solvent will be drained from the extraction chamber all of the solvent is dumped into the flask below with the rest of the alcohol this marks the end of one cycle and in theory we can cycle it as many times as we want for this extraction I'm only going to do it for two hours but there are preparations that require several hours or even days so at this point you can see why the socks of extractor is so useful it basically allows us to do repeated hot solvent extractions using a relatively small amount of solvent if I didn't have a sock sled I could just boil the hot pepper in a whole bunch of isopropanol or do manual repeated hot solvent extractions both of these options require more solvent and the second one can be a lot of work so two hours later I was left with this yellowish brown liquid the solution contains the pit ring but it also has a bunch of other stuff that was extracted along with it this includes things like fats as well as anything that's soluble and hot isopropanol a little bit of the pepper made it past my cotton so before moving on I need to quickly filter it I packed a cotton ball into a funnel and I filtered it through once everything had passed through I wash the round bottom and the funnel with a little bit of warm isopropanol I took away the funnel and I added a magnetic stir bar to the flask I now need to get rid of most of the isopropanol and to do this I use a simple distillation in the meantime I prepare a base solution by dissolving about one gram of potassium hydroxide in 10 milliliters of isopropanol this takes quite a long time and it doesn't really dissolve very well to speed things out by he did it a few times using a microwave eventually the big chunks were gone and this is pretty much good enough once I had about 15 milliliters left in the flask I stopped the distillation I then added the potassium hydroxide solution to the stuff that remained when the potassium hydroxide is added it reacts with acids as well as some fats that were extracted along with the peppering this will convert them into something that's soluble in water so in the next step when we add water to crash out the peppering these things don't come out with it it also allegedly reacts with the Chavis scene but I couldn't find a good source to support this so after about an hour I take it off the stand and there's quite a bit of solid stuff this is very easily removed by just passing it through a little bit of cotton the cotton in the flask are washed a few times with a little bit of isopropanol the funnel is removed and now it's time to isolate the peppering to do this I just need to add some water peppering is really insoluble in water so adding even a small amount greatly reduces its solubility every time water is added we can see a cloud of Pipper in crashing out eventually when the water is added it doesn't look like more pepperiness crashing out and at this point we're done the beaker is then placed in a fridge for a few days to allow the peppering to fully precipitate in the meantime I start to clean things up and I empty out all of the pepper from my socks hood extractor it's still wet with isopropyl alcohol but I'm going to wait a few days for it to fully dry out a couple days later I take my pepper in out of the fridge and it's time to filter it off I quickly do a vacuum filtration and I leave the vacuum on for a few minutes to dry things up using a spatula I scrape the PIP ring off the filter and I'm left with this paste one thing to note is that some of the Pitt brain is super fine and it's not able to be trapped by the filter it might look like a lot but there actually isn't very much here everything is transferred to a small beaker and I add some isopropanol the hot plate is turned on and everything is dissolved the initial amount of isopropanol that I added was a little bit too much so I let some boil off the beaker is covered with plastic wrap and I place it somewhere to cool it's really important that it cools down slowly otherwise the crystals turn out pretty crappy the crystallization is also really slow and even once it gets to room temperature no crystals formed only after 10 minutes did I see anything start to form the start of this time-lapse is about 30 minutes after it already cooled to room temperature the time-lapse was taken over about an hour and a half so in total it took around 2 hours for most of the crystals to form I left it overnight in the fridge and this is what I had in the morning the crystals were separated on the coffee filter and they were washed with a very small amount of ice-cold isopropyl alcohol the filter was removed and the isopropanol was allowed to evaporate after about a day or so I was left with some nice and dry peppering crystals my final recovery was about one gram i extracted it from 23 grams of pepper so this represents four percent of the total mass black pepper typically contains between five and nine percent so this is pretty close with pepper reen it's actually possible to grow pretty big crystals and the ones I have here are quite small to get larger crystals it needs to be crystallized over the course of days or weeks and not just hours anyway now I'm going to move on to the taste test that I promised just before I do it though remember that this is for entertainment and educational purposes only and you shouldn't do it yourself although pipping is a relatively common supplement sold in stores it can interfere with certain drugs and be potentially dangerous okay so here the product of the extraction on the left here I have the pepper that I extracted from which kind of looks washed out and lacking color on the right here I have the peppering which is double recrystallized and should be pretty much pure so to start things out and just see what it tastes like so get the little scoop it still definitely taste like pepper but it also tastes pretty horrible it has the pungency of peppery or Chavez seen so clearly I didn't extract everything there's it actually just tastes like regular pepper in terms of spiciness so I guess I didn't extract nearly everything but it's missing a lot of other flavors and it honestly just tastes taste pretty horrible okay so moving on to the peppery and I'll use a different spoon just to keep my pepper in clean so always do the pimp rain is going to be a lot more potent so I shouldn't take as much so what actually took about the same knob so I have it so I have just a little bit at the edge of the spoon here so take taste and actually just taste like nothing it tastes like the spiciness of pepper but also nothing it really doesn't taste that bad and in terms of spiciness turn out that bad either so that's about it the pepper that extracted from tastes absolutely horrible well not maybe not absolutely horrible it tastes pretty bad I definitely wouldn't want to eat it it tastes it does not it does not taste good the Pickering on the other hand is it's spicy but it's not that spicy the I think the Scoville rating was a hundred thousand or something which is like twenty times that of a jalapeno but I I don't know if I agree with that it's I mean I had a decently sized scoop and it really does dot I really isn't that spicy anyway that's about it for now if you guys have any other suggestions or things you'd like to see in this series please let me know in the comments some of you may have noticed that I'm wearing a novel red shirt in the video and if you want to pick one up yourself you can check out the link to Spreadshirt in the description a big thanks goes out to all of my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me will see my videos at least 24 hours before I post it to YouTube and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end of the video like you see here also all supporters are able to directly message me and I try to respond within a day you

Channel: NileRed

Views: 1,391,882

Rating: 4.9527483 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, chemistry, piperine, black, pepper, edible, chem, science, nilered, spice, spicy, chemical

Id: YGZddY3R1pU

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2017