pitubo said:With harmala tea, it is really easy to dissolve table salt into the tea while it is still hot. Use between 100 and 200 grams per liter of tea. Then wait for the tea too cool and for harmala HCl crystals (tiny needles) to form. Once the liquid has cooled down, stir it one more time to unlodge any crystals from the jar's (or pan's) walls. When the all the crystals have sunk to the bottom, decant the supernatant liquid.
Now you could pour the bottom layer through a coffee filter as is and dry it, but it would be quite simple to add fresh hot water to the bottom layer with the crystals and repeat the dissolution of fresh salt into the hot solution, in order to obtain an even more pure batch of harmala HCl crystals.
The theory seemed so good and simple, i always advised my friends interested in rue but not so into extractions to try it, though i never tried it myself.
So i attempted this method to see how effective it is and the results were way beyond what i expected, i thought i will get a crude extract but i got the usual golden chips i get with normal extraction, not the same purity but definitely a fairly good product.
I will detail the process here for those interested.
I soaked 35g of whole syrian rue seeds in some hot water for 30 mins, {added twice of their volume water and a bit of vinegar then microwaved them on high for 5 mins, filtered through a piece of cotton cloth, squeezed well the liquid out of the seeds by twisting the cloth}×5
The combined rue tea volume of 1.5L was filtered through a bottle with cotton stuffed at the neck
I reheated the tea in microwave and dissolved 200g of table salt in it, the tea was left to cool slowly for 8 hours then i stirred it gently and let the tiny crystals settle
I decanted the top layer and filtered the crystals with a coffee filter, then i pressed the water out of the fiter with tissues and dried it using a hair drier
The whole process is fast and very simple it took less than 12 hours to finish it
Farther purification steps can be done but i'm satisfied with this and i will test it soon
Sorry for the rotated images, anyone knows how to fix it?