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I could swear I did a write up for this burn base around the time I posted the root beer incense recipe. It turns out I only intended to type this and haven't yet.
Sassafras is is really neat. I have a long standing love of root bear floats and it smells....like root beer. Mom started getting the root for herbal tea some time after she found that sugar did not play nicely with her body. Since it was one of the key ingredients in the original old root beer recipes, it seemed like a good place for her to start trying to replace the root beer float, so I tend to forget that not everyone has it in their spice cupboard, and some people may not have even heard of this new world native.
Asia has a species of this tree as well, and both the Asian and the American trees got used to make fragrant furniture for a while, though it's sadly fallen out of fashion. Native American tribes uses many parts of the tree and at some point in time ALL parts of the plant have been used for medicinal, culinary, and aromatic properties. It's still a source for key ingredients in Cajun cooking and has had a modest comeback in teas among us health food store nuts. Sadly, it's not in root beer anymore due to dispute over whether it's carcinogenic or not, BUT since I have found sites that claim ALL plants contain carcinogens when burned, anyone who uses any kind of incense is in trouble already.
Oh, and the bark can be turned into Ecstasy with a full lab, large amounts of time, and a chemistry degree. It will get you arrested to attempt it and I would think it would go much father in tea or chess sets, but crazy people still try it.
In a test burn, on charcoal it's pretty much root beer in smoke form. I like root beer. without the coal smoke, it's a bit oily, similar to the smell you get when using clean oil in a deep fryer. Mixed with water, the smell remains stable when it's dry, and though the oily smell is not bad exactly, it's also a bit odd. This burn base needs extra fragrance to mute the cooking oil smell in a mix.
It grinds very nicely, but is a bit fussy to sift. It likes to clump so the ground root needs to be pushed threw the reusable mesh coffee filter I use, but turns into a nice fine powder easily.
And it's got it's own binder.
Yep, if you just add water to powdered root, it holds together all on it's own. Since it's pretty flammable, it's a good ideal to add something to slow the burn, but it's practically combustible incense as soon as you get it wet.
It dries insanely fast. In a mater of hours after mixing a blend, I can burn a full stick. This means with mixes I use this as a base for, I only need part of a day to get from ingredients to burning. The finished sticks tend to be slightly more brittle than my blends with binders, but not by much. It also means for hand shaping you need more water more often or it gets to dry to form without braking.
The best bit? EXTRUDING! Most of the other bases I work with don't play very nicely with extruding, but sassafras root is great for this method. I have a syringe for getting liquid medicine down the throats of toddlers and protesting cats. The diameter is between udon noodles and spaghetti. I load the mix in and push it out on a cutting board like frosting, hand roll a bit to compensate if my hand wiggles, and I'm done.
It may take a bit more TLC to get the fragrance right with this base, but it's very useful. Plus, it's yummy in tea.
Happy blending.
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