With all of the buzz surrounded essential oils, I'm curious if anyone knows what would happen with the steam distillation of dehydrated peppers? Would the oil that is extracted be considered pepper "essential oil" or would it be capsaicin? Would oil from peppers even be extractable using steam distillation? Any scientists out there?
Steam Distillation with dehydrated peppers?
- Thread starter BearDown
- Start date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_oil
You would end up as an oil.
Have done distilling in the early 90's, you need a dedicated system for peppers if you plan on doing it.
You would end up as an oil.
Have done distilling in the early 90's, you need a dedicated system for peppers if you plan on doing it.
Steam distillation would get you some capsaicin, but it's not a very efficient process for separating it from peppers. You would end up with an oil that would have a lot of other compounds from the fruit and would certainly have some amount of capsaicin, but the process works much better on chemicals that are more volatile.
Regular solvent extraction or supercritical fluid extraction is better if you're trying to collect large amounts.
Regular solvent extraction or supercritical fluid extraction is better if you're trying to collect large amounts.
It would be allot easier to use oil to extract the flavours, add all together and blitz, give it a month, then filter.