Oil Distillation Process

Essential oils add scent to potpourri, homemade candles, bath salts and countless aroma therapy applications. You can also replace herbs in recipes with a drop or two of essential oil, eliminating burned herbs or oregano stuck in your teeth. The problem is essential oils, especially pure ones, are relatively expensive. To get around this problem, you can make essential oils at home with a simple distillation setup. It may sound difficult, but is actually quite simple.

Instructions

1

Place your stock pot on the largest burner of your stovetop or hot plate. Fill it with about 1 inches of room temperature water. Set a round cooling rack in the bottom of your stock pot; make sure it fits the pot exactly and sits at least 1 inch above the water. If it doesn't, you may stack two cooling racks to get the desired height.

2

Pull your cooling rack out of the pot and trace its shape onto a piece of canvas with chalk. Cut out the canvas circle and place the rack back in the pot with the canvas on top. Center a wide-mouthed jar on the canvas. The jar should ideally be about 2 inches shorter than the rim of the stock pot. In this case, wider is better than taller.

3

Chop up to 3 lbs. of fresh herbs or crumble up to 1 lbs. of dried herbs. The dried herbs may take longer to distill, adding a risk of burning your oil if you leave them in the distiller too long. Fresh herbs will simply wilt as time goes by. Spread the herbs in an even layer around your jar; make sure none of them get into the jar.

4

Fill a large, shallow glass bowl with ice and set it on top of the stock pot. The bottom of the bowl should cover the mouth of the stock pot completely and the lowest point should be directly over the center of the jar. The bowl should not touch the jar; a 1-inch gap is ideal.

5

Turn the heat on your burner to low and let it heat for an hour. As the water in the pot heats, the steam will rise and vaporize the oils from your herbs. The liquid rises to the bottom of the cold bowl and condenses, then slides down to the bowl's lowest point and drips into the jar.