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10 yrs ago Chemistry project

I was supervising a lab and a student wanted to extract the capsaicin out of peppers. We took around a pound of habanero peppers and in a few batches, froze them with liquid nitrogen so we could grind them in a mortar and pestle. After that we placed the ground up peppers in a half liter hexane and stirred for 2 hrs. Then evaporated the hexane after filtering. We were left with around a milliliter of this oil and it was hot, but not death inducing hot. I know they sell the pure crystals and am curious if anyone actually had placed a very small one on their tongue?
 
Interesting. I'd never put any on my tongue...probably. Reminds me of those PTC test strips people sometimes use to determine if you're a super-taster.
I've wanted to try this before. I'm honestly surprised that many habs only gave a mil of capsaicin, but I guess that makes sense.
 
Aren't most pepper sprays just suspended capsaicin oil that gets dispersed? I suppose you could mace something, and taste what comes out...!
 
I'd probably use a microwave transparent solvent and Microwave Assisted Extraction (MAE) for a fast and efficient extraction protocol.

What was the recovery % of oil by weight?

If you take the PPM value of recovery and multiply by 16 you can obtain a (somewhat crude)SHU value.
 
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