How to: Easy homemade spice fragrance and flavor oleoresin collection with Wisesorb Flower Drying Silica Gel Crystals.

 I’ve come across a novel concept, in extending the use case scenario, in my studies and observations regarding chaparral plants of California, in the case of implementing Wisesorb’s Flower Drying Silica Gel Crystals - not only as a desiccant, yet I’ve found that it seems to bind spice | herb oleoresins to the structure of the silica particles.

Wisesorb Flower Drying Silica Gel Crystals, image courtesy of Amazon and Wisesorbent Technologies.

What does this mean, in particular?

Within the world of spices, I imagine that I would update this blog article, in days and weeks to come (I started on this project idea at the end of February, 2023) with exciting developments in detailing a rather simple and relatively labor and machinery-free method of processing fresh plant material in to an accessible pure oleoresin, which can be observed as in the image below:

A closeup of Wisesorb Silica Gel crystals with some fresh spice herb material and bits of oleoresin.

What an exciting thing to observe, for a fragrance and flavor enthusiast, perhaps with the added feature of bearing an artisanal crafting aspiration, in manufacturing ingredient concentrates from scratch. Imaginably, from this point, I could keep loading the silica gel crystals up with fresh spice herb materials until a satisfactory amount of oleoresin had built up in the crystals, at which point, I could perform a simple solvent extraction, of my choosing, of such, dependent, perhaps, upon the plant’s best reputed solvent, determined per species of harvested plant. In this instance, I came across a fresh, minty, mesquite-smelling chaparral plant in my local commonplace whereabouts.

Update: my backpack with this project, started, in it, had been stolen from me, so I can not currently continue this blog article. Hopefully, some day, I’ll be able to come back to it.