Natural Perfume Blending Workshop, Part Two

This coming Saturday I'll be teaching part two of my perfumery course.  The class is for students who have taken the first class in Natural Perfume Blending but want to further their blending skills. The original kit of 50 or so oils will be added to with some rare and precious oils such as ambrette, hay absolute, tuberose, yuzu and pink pepper. The concepts of locking and burying will be explored and there will be specific assignments to deepen your understanding of blending and perfume creation, as well as sharpen your sense of smell.

Natural Perfume Blending,

Part Two

Saturday, November 10th

1:30 to 4:30

3rd Ward

195 Morgan Ave.

Brooklyn, NY

Acorn Flour

Last year a good friend went through the laborious process of making acorn flour.  I was intrigued, being the urban forager that I am, but definitely put off by the amount of work.  Then she showed up one day with a slice of bread she'd made and I've been determined to try making it ever since.  The flavor was so intense, rich and flavorful so I was surprised that she only used a third of a cup of the flour along with a melange of unbleached white and whole wheat.

It's acorn season and I've been getting an education in oak trees.  I've learned to identify white oaks, which apparently are some of the sweetest acorns to find.  They're also a substantial size making them worth shucking.  I've collected a couple of pounds from three trees up in Prospect Park and am planning to go back for more.  I can already tell that this hefty bag of acorns is only going to make a small amount of flour, so as long as I'm putting in the time I might as well go all the way and collect more.

I've gotten a lot of information on how to do this from Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.  His biggest piece of advice on collecting them was to look for little worm holes and discard those.   Acorns are bitter from their high tannin content and the tannin has to be leached out.  I've seen a lot of different versions on how to do this but his cold water leaching method seems to be the most reasonable.

First you have to shuck the acorns - under water!  With the pointed end facing up I used a hammer to crack the acorns and then threw them into a pan of water.  The hulls are kind of elastic so some come off the nut quite easily while others need to be wrestled with.  Then I threw them in a blender filled with a couple of cups of water.  When I had about two cups of acorns in there I blended them up to make what looks like a coffee milkshake.  The sludge was then transferred into a large jar and filled with more water and put in the refrigerator.  Every day I poured off the water and added more, shook it up and placed it back in the 'fridge.  I did this for a week and then lined a colander with cheesecloth and poured the whole mess through.  Pulling the edges of the cheesecloth together I gently squeezed out as much water as I could.

Now the goal is to dry out the mass.  Spread it evenly on a cookie sheet (preferably one with sides) and set the oven on low.  Mine doesn't have a low setting so I warmed it to the lowest temperature and then turned it off and set the cookie sheet inside.  You don't want to bake the acorns, just dry them out so keep your eye on them.  It took a couple of hours of turning the oven on and off and checking periodically before it was ready.  I used a coffee grinder free of coffee residue to grind the dried mass into flour.  I have a separate one I use for spices so this worked perfectly.  In small batches try to grind the flour as fine as possible.

It's a lot of work for a small amount of flour, that's for sure.  While the first batch was drying in the oven I started shucking the second batch.  I figure I have three more trials to go and I'm hoping to be done in time for holiday baking.  I'll let you know how it goes, and whether it's worth the labor.  If it's as delicious as I remember I'll be thoroughly gratified.  Hank Shaw also has some delicious sounding recipes on his blog which you can find here.

Beach Glass Bottles

Green glass vials from the beaches of Brooklyn.

I've been very lucky this past summer finding bottles on the beach.  I seem to have hit the motherload.  Clear, amber and green glass bottles in all shapes and sizes are finding their way into my collection.  Some of them take on a frosted patina which makes them glow in the light from being rolled and tumbled in the ocean.  I can't help wondering where they originated and what was their original use.

Two perfume bottles

Cleaning them up and getting them ready to be used has been a big job.  They spend a lot of time soaking in soapy water in between scrubbings.  I've collected a vast array of bottle brushes to help with the job.  Once they're squeaky clean they're sterilized in a boiling water vat before they can be used.

Amber vials

A collection of tiny vials

I live my life in a very "green" way, long before anyone called it green.   I deplore waste of any kind so to find these bottles and be able to give them another life is a joy.  I've been collecting caps from broken bottles for ages so spent some happy days sorting through the collection and finding the proper cap.  Some of the bottles will be filled with the colognes I was producing this past summer but some are for sale on my Etsy store.  I love that each bottle is a one of a kind treasure.

Beach glass bottles put to use for my cologne collection.

Park Perfumes Review

The online gardening magazine Soiled and Seeded, dedicated to cultivating a garden culture, has been so kind as to review my trio of Park Perfumes.  This is some of my earliest work and includes some synthetic oils that I couldn't get in nature.  I'm in the process of revising those perfumes using only natural oils and utilizing some of the skills and experience I've accumulated over the past ten years.  The first to be finished is The Ambergill which formerly used a synthetic amber note.

After extensively researching amber I discovered that there is no real amber oil extracted from a plant. There is a pine tree in India that exudes a sap that a lot of it starts from, but then many processes occur and a proprietary blend of oils and macerations are added to create amber in many forms. Some are crystalized in beezwax so a mere touch melts on the fingertips.  These blends are closely guarded secret formulas.

I've had a bottle of amber oil for many years that I bought from the Persian perfume vendors on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I knew that it was probably adulterated with synthetic materials but I liked that warm velvety chord and couldn't be deprived. This year I made my own proprietary blend with absolutes and essential oils. I'm happy to have come up with a blend I can use in my perfumes without resorting to it's synthetic counterpart.  From that I've created a scented Amber Oil.

Now that I had an amber chord to work with I went ahead and recreated The Ambergill, a perfume inspired by the beautiful Ambergill ravine and falls in the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY. A gill is a narrow stream-filled glen, which feeds a grotto known as the Amergill Pool, whose banks are populated by green herons, columbine, wild roses & blackberries. Amber, oakmoss & neroli are the peak notes of this warm perfume.

Cologne Experiment Results

The results are in!  My experiments macerating dried flowers, roost, rinds and herbs are completed and I have detailed notes on the results.  After a month's time the liquor was strained off and clarified and then some were matched with hydrosols.  Certain recipes didn't work at all and were discarded but most of them yielded results.  I was really surprised by the tenacity of the different brews, some of them will last days on a tester strip. 

Summer Splash came as a real surprise.  The floral note that resulted from roses and lavender macerating with vetiver, sweet annie and orange peel was astonishing.  It was blended with lemon balm hydrosol to create a summery splash.  This one changes over time in a most interesting way.

Florida Water epitomizes summer for me. There is a large Latino community intermingled in my Brooklyn neighborhood and a lot of the pharmacies cater to this clientelle so are stocked with Florida Water. I have memories of my first years in Brooklyn discovering the pleasures of an evening shower followed with a splash of Florida Water. Orange blossom and clove are the distinctive notes in the cologne so I decided orange blossom hydrosol would be used with a maceration of meyer lemon rind, sweet woodruff, lavender, benzoin, cinnamon and clove. The results smell surprisingly like the water I used all those years ago, and I think it could be considered suitable for men as well as women.

Verbena Water is the result of macerating fresh lemon verbena and sweet woodruff from my garden, dried jasmine, linden blossoms and vanilla pods and then mixed with verbena hydrosol.  It's as fresh as it sounds, the softness of the woodruff and vanilla pared with lemon verbena counterbalance each other beautifully.

Rose Garden is a blend of dried roses, angelica root, jasmine, vanilla pods and lemon verbena which was then mixed with rosewater to create a veritable rose garden in a bottle.

Violet Water is the result of orris root, sweet woodruff, benzoin and jasmine marrying beautifully to create a woodland violet sort of fragrance which was then blended with cornflower water.  Violets contain a chemical called ionones which give them their characteristic fragrance.  Orris root, the dried and aged rhizome of the Iris pallida, also contains ionones but also has a woodland quality to it.  There are no violets in this blend so the name is merely a suggestion.

Each cologne is bottled in a one of a kind vintage glass bottle collected from the beaches of Brooklyn, NY. They've been scrubbed clean and sterilized but they're old and scratched to different degrees. Expect some wear from tumbling in the ocean for who knows how long.

Making Elderflower Liqueur

Elderflowers macerating in vodka

A few years ago elderflower became the new darling of the artisanal cocktail explosion.  It was hard following up something as popular as yuzu but those people at St-Germain know what's good.  Elderflower liqueur has been on every mixologist's short list in recent past, specifically St-Germain.  I was astonished to discover that this strange, subtlety flavored libation is a new invention and not the ancient tradition their advertising campaign would have you believe.

Elderflowers grow all over Prospect Park and another artisanal cocktail enthusiast told me that he'd made his own liqueur from the flowers in the park.  I made a point of getting together with another friend, a local forager and farmer, to hunt for the blossoms.  Armed with wildflower guides we set out and identified plenty of look a likes but came home empty handed.  A second foray found what we were looking for.

I've read that the flowers must be picked in the morning when they're at their most fragrant, and that they should be used within two hours of picking.  The stems are toxic and undesirable so the flowers were cut from the stem and placed in a wide mouth jar.  When the jar was full I covered the flowers in vodka and capped it.  I'd also read that the flowers will float to the top, and that the flowers that come in contact with air would turn brown.  The flavor is not altered, it's just not very appetizing, so I placed a clean lid from a slightly smaller jar upside down on top of the flowers to weigh them down under the vodka.  Every day I removed the second jar lid and shook the jar, then replaced the lid.

I macerated the blossoms for a little over a month.  Each day when I shook it I would compare the aroma with the small bottle of St-Germain that I have.  It was only in the last week or so that I began to notice a similarity, prior to that I was wondering if I had the wrong genus.  I find a honey note in St-Germain so now that it's been strained, like many of my other herbal liqueurs, it's waiting for that special local honey to be ready before it's bottled and labeled and ready to use.  Results to follow.

My First Class Coming Up at the New York Horticultural Society