Making Herbal Infused Oils ~ Warming/Quick Method

Hi everybody and welcome back to the channel. In today's video I'm going to show you what to do if you need herbal infused oils in a pinch. Hi my name is Corrine and here at Spirea I share videos that weave together plant wisdom, holistic health, self-sufficiency with just a dash of magic. If this sounds interesting to you I'd love for you to stick around. So first I want to talk a little bit about what a herbal infused oil is and how it differs from an essential oil. So essential oils are only a portion of the chemical constituents that a plant has and they have to go through a very specific distillation process in order to yield essential oils. When we're working with herbal infused oils, which is actually my preference, we're using a carrier oil of some kind. So this can be apricot kernel oil, olive oil, coconut oil, jojoba oil, there's so many options out there and that oil then becomes the medium by which we extract the medicine we're trying to get out of a plant. So let me break this down for you, everybody here has probably made a cup of tea before. When we make a cup of tea the medium that we use to extract the medicine from the plant is water, when we make a tincture the medium that we use to extract the chemical constituents from the plant is alcohol, and when we make a herbal infused oil the medium that we use is oil of some kind. Now of course your end product is going to really depend on the quality of oil that you use and the type of oil that you use is also sort of determinant based on what you're planning on doing with it. So I'm going to link a blog post that I did a few years ago and it breaks down all the different types of carrier oils and what exactly herbal infused oils are and I'm going to link that in the description section below. So now that we know what a herbal infused oil is I'm going to go through a method that I sometimes use if I am in need of a herbal infused oil and I don't have the time to wait to do it kind of the old-fashioned way or the way that I prefer. So I am going to put this caveat out here that this is not my method of preference, however it does work and it certainly works when you need herbal infused oils as I said in the intro segment in a pinch and this happens to me so there's a few scenarios where this may happen for me specifically this happens when I do not anticipate demand in of one of my products. So in this particular case I am almost completely sold out of my nourishing face oil it's probably one of my most popular products and this summer I thought I made enough infused oil to get me through the winter months and I clearly didn't. So in this case this is an excellent example of when I will use this method because it's winter outside and all the plants are dead so I have to use this method. Another great example would be in the case of say of a cold and flu situation and you want to make some garlic mullein ear oil you know you've got a sick child you don't have four to six weeks to wait for the oils to be ready in their own time and you want to kind of expedite this process and finish it in an afternoon this would be a great example of when you'd want to use this method too and if you're interested let me know I can do a video on how to make garlic mullein ear oil because when my son was a little dude we went through that stuff all the time because when kids are little even the just a slight cold or runny nose tends to go right into the ear canals and ear infections are really common so if you'd like me to do a video on that just leave a comment below and I can definitely do that. All right so for this process my favorite method is using either an instant pot or a crock pot so you're going to need that this is the insert from my instant pot and then as you can see in the bottom I have some washcloths this helps to hold the jar in place so it's not kind of shuffling and moving all over not necessary but I have found it helpful like I said a crock pot or an instant pot will work for this you could do it on the stove as well if you decide to do this on the stovetop please please use a double boiler you don't want the goal of this is that you're warming the oils you're not heating them if we warm oils they go rancid and then you're gonna end up with a nasty end product anyway and you will have wasted all of your herbs and your oil so make sure we're talking warm warm warm here so make sure your crock pot also has a warming function I have found that the low temperature might be a bit too hot but everybody you guys you know your appliance is best if you can put your finger in the water when it's on low and very comfortably set it in there and it doesn't feel too hot chances are it's just fine so like I said you're going to need a crock pot instant pot something like that you're going to need a carrier oil of choice so today I actually have some of my elderflower infused apricot kernel oil left from the summer so I'm going to use this along with some jojoba oil that I have to infuse dried rose hips so I know that sounded really complicated but my face oil uses two different carrier oils and two different herbs as a base if you're interested in making face oil you can grab a copy of my book because I do actually have a very similar recipe to mine in my book or of course you can just pop over to my website and if you don't want to make it yourself you can buy some off me I don't mind so here we go we're now I'm going to talk a little bit about what the process is for dried herbs as well because I do I prefer using fresh herbs to make herbal infused oils and I've done lots of videos before I believe I did one on St. John's Wort in the summer so I'm going to link that up here and you can check that out but when I don't have fresh herbs I do use dried herbs and there's one extra step that I like to do when I'm using dried herbs and that is to actually kind of pound them in a mortar and pestle and what this helps to do is it helps to release some of the remaining essential oils and kind of reinvigorate and reactivate the herbs from what is essentially a dormant state so first I'm going to measure out how many rose hips I need now when I'm doing dried herbs I usually fill the jar about halfway when I'm doing fresh herbs I actually like to fill the jar all the way and the reason for that is I don't have to compensate for the water content with dried herbs so you can use about half as many and that's good so I'm going to measure it out loosely first and then I'm going to put it into my mortar and pestle and you'll know that it's working because suddenly the plants will start to become quite aromatic and so I'll just kind of start to work it gently until and I already I can start to smell the rose hip aroma coming out you can see that you're sort of activating these plants bringing them back from a dormant state because we do lose some medicine when we dry herbs right because think about it all many of the water soluble constituents of a plant will evaporate off as the plant is drying so as I said I do prefer using fresh herbs but seeing as it's January and it's snowing outside dried herbs are my next best bet so once I'm done doing this and I've got my herbs back in the jar I'll come back and show you what to do next. So once you have your herbs in your jar now again this method can be used for fresh herbs and a lot of people actually like to use this method for fresh herbs because it helps to evaporate some of the water off when we work with fresh plant material there is of course water and oil and water don't mix they can result in molding and they can result in rancidity and a lot of people don't really want to bother with that a lot of folks just prefer using dried herbs but if you warm them gently the water will evaporate off and I've always found that with fresh herbs I do get a more potent end product depending on the plant there are some plants that I won't even make oils from when they're dried St. John's Wort is a great example. Anywho now that you have your herbs in the jar all you want to do is top it off with oil so I'm going to use what I have left from my elderflower apricot kernel oil and I'm going to cover up all those rose hips nicely and once all of this is in I will then top off with jojoba oil but again use what you have use what you're comfortable with some of my favorite carrier oils I actually can't use when I'm making products almond oil is one of my favorite but because folks are allergic to nuts and I sell products I don't usually use it but I do like apricot kernel oil sometimes I'll use coconut oil sometimes I'll use avocado oil it really just depends on what it is that I'm making which one's got this one I ended up having two bottles open at the same time which is such a silly thing to do so I'll finish this one off perfect and then top off with the rest. Now if you have fresh herbs when you're using doing this process you may want to keep the lid off again this will allow for the water content from the plant to evaporate off while it's in the slow cooker so keeping that lid off will allow that water to evaporate off so from here all I'm going to do for me because these are dried herbs and I don't really have to worry about any water content evaporating off I'm just going to put a lid on mostly because I'm and if I knock into this in the kitchen I don't want oil spilling all over the place from here what you're going to do is place your jar inside of either again your instant pot or your crock pot and you're going to nestle I'll get my husband to zoom in you're going to nestle those cloths around and this is to ensure that your jar doesn't shift or move and then I'm going to go and go to the sink and fill this with water now you want to fill it as high as you can without of course water spilling into your oil you really want to avoid that that's going to ensure that the contents are going to warm all the way up through the jar and then once I have it in my instant pot I'll show you the setting that I like to keep it on. So as you can see we're over at my instant pot probably one of the most used appliance in my kitchen I have it set to warm so again please check your crock pot test it out put some water in it put it on low if you can't comfortably hold your finger hand in there for a long period of time then the temperature is too hot okay so you want it on on warm as you can see I have it set to low which is exactly what I want I don't want to go any higher than that resist the urge to crank up the heat because you want this done faster you're just going to end up with a burnt rancid or nasty end product and I like to let mine go for about 12 hours so I just press start and I'm going to let the instant pot do its thing as you can see there's quite a bit of water in there I've got my dishcloth so nothing will jostle around and I'm just going to let time do her work. So I hope you found this video helpful this process can be used for any herb and oil combination so if you want to use plantain, yarrow, lavender, calendula you know because you want to make a first aid salve awesome you want to infuse some cayenne into oil so you can make a pain relieving salve this will work for that too it'll even work for things like pine or spruce resin and you want to infuse that in oil for a chest rub there's really no limitations to this process at all now if you have any questions or comments please leave those below and until next time this is Coreen from Spirea Herbs wishing you health and wellness.