Enfleurage

The enfleurage cold

This technique makes it possible to treat fragile flowers (as the flowers of Jasmin) which preserve their odor after the gathering but which does not support heat.
La odorless grease, often of the animal Grease refined, is spread out over the two faces out of glass of a frame out of wooden. After sortbeing carefully sorted, the flowers are pricked delicately in grease. The every day, one turns over the frames to make fall the flowers which have " cédé" their gasoline with the Lipid S and one replaces them. Grease absorbs the odor of the flowers for three months, until saturation. By this method, 1 kilo of grease can absorb the perfume of 3 kilos flowers.

At the end of the enfleurage, one collects grease with a spatula. One dissolves gently this Pommade which is then elutriated by ethyl treatment. Scented grease is then introduced into a threshing-machine with alcohol. During this extraction, the odorous molecules dissolve in alcohol. The mixture is cooled in order to be able to remove the grease impoverished of gasoline by filtration. After having eliminated alcohol by flash distillation, in general cold, one obtains what one calls the Absolue .

Industrially, this technique was abandoned about 1930 because one needed an important labor and a great number of frames. Moreover, grease was difficult to handle because it founded as soon as the weather was too hot.

The enfleurage hot

Already known in the Antiquity by the Egyptians, the enfleurage hot or digestion was also practiced in France, with Grasse: one put to melt of grease in large pots heated with the Bain-marie and one threw the flowers there. One stirred up the mixture during two hours. The following day, one removed the flowers of the day before with a strainer punt and one replaced them by fresh flowers. One repeated at least 10 times the operation. When grease could not absorb the perfume of the flowers any more, one filtered to separate grease from the flowers. One obtained a scented paste called Pommade which one treated consequently technical extraction that for a enfleurage cold.

The rose tree hundred-sheets, the violet, the Fleur of orange tree and the cassy were treated thus.

Reference:

B.M. Lawrence, Essential oils, Perfumer and Flavourist, 1980.

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