The leaves contain other unwanted stuff, and only a minute quantity of safrole, they make a rather dirty oil with little valuables in there.
As for using the woodchipper, I wouldn't recommend that either.
If you remove the bark properly, you can reduce the total volume of plant matter to steam distill much, meaning you don't have the worthless inner
wood taking place away in the still pot.
Everything else besides the root bark(and actually the aerial parts of the bark aren't very good either), is not of much value.
You should better do a good pre-selection of the most valuable material only, and process that first.
If you then still are motivated to repeat the same for a small number of dirtier oil, compared to your first batch in high quality where only the good
rootbark is used, it also gives you a very visual impression on this matter.
And you will see with your own eyes how much more, and how much of a better oil the rootbark gives and how much worse and less every part else.
The qualitative differences will be very impressive as well.
This way you also don't ruin the good oil out of the best parts with the low quality plant matter, something you will be happy about later, thats for
sure. |