Lavender Extract

Every time I've walked past this lavender on the front path in the past couple of weeks, I've had a spark of something I can only describe as a potent mix of memory and idea. It's something I know deeply, but don't know at all. An instinct crossed with an experiment. I always pluck a flower or a leaf, crush it in my hands and stick my nose in for a massive inhale. If you're there, I'll shove your nose in it too, assuming you'd find the smell of fresh-crushed lavender as glorious and miraculous as I do. But as I said, the lavender was urging me on to do something else with it. And not just dry the flowers and make sachets for under the pillow.

 None of the usual lavender uses -- tea, strewn in bath tub, skin lotion -- were hitting the spot. I was after something sciency, not crafty. (Secretly I was imagining myself in a rustic laboratory in the middle of a huge walled garden filled with medicinal plants, filling rich blue bottles with potions and cures, sealing them with glass stoppers... as you do. Well, as I do, sometimes. OK, quite a lot. Being an apothecary is either a past life memory, or a latent midlife crisis for this gardener.)

Anyway, I was delighted this morning to find out, on the internet of course, about lavender extract. Turns out you can make lavender extract just like you make vanilla extract. You can cook and bake with it, put it in your bathtub, use it as perfume, add it to creams and lotions and potions! It's kind of like making jam -- bottling some of the summer love for later in the year.

But it's much easier than making jam. It takes about 10 minutes. So I had to do it. Today. Right now.

How to:
Get yourself outside with some scales and clippers, and cut about 100 grams of lavendar. That's two or three generous bunches. Mind the bees. I was worried we didn't have that many bees this year... I've changed my mind about that. The lavendar is crawing with bees today.

When I got back to the instructions, they said 100 grams of flowers, and I'd picked stems and flowers, so I decided to split the crop, and make flower extract and leaf extract, and see if there's any difference.

Chop up the flowers. You can do this in a blender or food processor, or by hand. Hand-chopping the flowers is kind of alarming. The lavender flower heads are like beautiful soft furry caterpillar bodies; when I cut into them I half expected them to spurt out guts. But they just spurted out the most amazing smell, thank goodness!

Stuff the chopped flowers into a jar. 

Cover with extracting liquid. You have a few choices: vodka or brandy; apple cider vinegar; or vegetable glycerine. Apparently they all do the trick. I used vodka for this batch because I had some in the pantry. I'm going to pick up some vegetable glycerine later and make another batch with that, for some swanky mock-tail action over the summer.

Steep and shake. For the next two to six weeks, this jar needs to sit out in a warm, sunny spot, and get a daily shake up. Then it gets strained and put into a rich blue bottle, sealed with a glass stopper, and stored alongside the vanilla extract in the pantry.

I processed the leaves the same way. But I can tell after only half an hour, that the flower extract is far better smelling than the leaves. The leaves have a distinct grassy overtone that I can't imagine wanting to cook with. The flowers, however, have got me thinking about Christmas shortbread, and lavender scented meringues!

So that's how you make a tincture -- a liquid infused with the properties of a plant -- in your modern kitchen. No need for a rustic lab in a walled medicinal plant garden. The lemon-balm-gone-mad in the back garden is next.

Thank you to Andrea. I found out all about lavender extract, its uses and how to make it, on her lovely and very informative website, Frugally Sustainable.