igorcarajo said:
What if, instead of doing several boils, one would put the seeds in a large glass jar, fill it with mildly acidic water, and left it alone for, I don’t know, a day, a week, or a month? Would that extract the alkaloids just as well as the boils? Would there be any benefit? Thanks in advance.
Soaking the seeds for a while before whole seed extraction is a good idea but i don't think it is enough. Before, I tried to basify the liquid from a soak that started with boiling water and distilled white vinegar and nothing significant came out, mostly contaminants that make fileteing harmalas so unpleasant. Which led me to the idea of doing a hot water soak to get rid of some of the contaminants.
Another time, i tried to verify this so i separated the harmalas from the contaminants and here are the outcomes. (starting material: 150 g whole seeds)
Pic1: the precipitates of the liquid from the basification.
Pic2: reacidified but most of the stuff doesn't dissolve.
Pic3: the contaminants, ~700 mg (collected from acid phase).
Pic4: vs 70mg harmalas, scraping it off the paper filter made it powdery (collected by manske)
Pic5: the golden yoni :b
Pic6: rough attempt at observing the powdery needles with a foldscope.
The good news: the liquid from the soak can be discarded.
The bad news: a lot more contaminants are still in the seeds and are present throughout the extraction, so this doesn't improve on the extraction process but it feels good to dump that liquid and know that you got rid of some of them.
I think the goods are better mechanically extracted from the seeds by squeezing them out or by pressure cooking cycles.
Perhaps Soaking them longer might be different but it feels unlikely to me.