With my daughter being home for a while after some unforeseen circumstances, I decided that this is a great opportunity to teach her some new life skills in-between her studies, and today's lessons were focused on making soaps creams and body scrubs using Aloe ferox.
In the last 3 Speak video, I took you through the harvesting process of Aloe Ferox while taking a look at the properties of a mature plant.
But harvesting aloe ferox is only the first step.
In the past, I have had a look at the extraction if the bitter yellow aloe crystals that you can extract from the leaves, however today I would like to focus on the very simple process of the extraction of the Aloe gel itself, which I will be using for making some very basic body products.
Let me just start by highlighting this; the two major parts of the aloe used once harvested is the outer skin, which contains a thick yellow sap, that crystallizes once dry, and then the inner gelatinous mass - the yellow gel however is excessively bitter, so trust me, if your hands come into contact with this, make sure you steer clear of your taste buds. So to avoid having to deal with the most of the bitter sap, I normally place the ends of the leaves that I harvested into some water, and this allows that gel to bleed out without congealing. I also do the same as soon as I cut the leaves into more workable sections.
You can of course place this water in a slow cooker if you would like to make the most out of your harvest, and then slowly reduce the water until only the crystals are left. That can then be stored for later use. But for today, I focused on the gel inner of the leaf - Because that was the part that I intended using.
Firstly - I took the leaves that I harvested, and as I said above, I cut them up into more workable chunks, placing them in some water to bleed out as I went. Obviously as you get closer to the tip of the leaf, the fleshy inner thins out, so I normally just work up to a point where the inside is comfortable to remove in relation to time vs production.
Once the leaf is cut into manageable sections I then proceed to cut down the spiny sides of the leaves |(as you can see above). Then I used a dessert spoon to separate the thick outer skin from the inner mass.
Simply force the spoon between the skin and the flesh and slowly run it down the grain of the leaf on one side, then strip away the loosened skin, carry on doing this till all of the skin on the one side is off, then turn it around and do the other side. Remember to place the stripped inner plant mass directly into clean water if you want to avoid the bitter sap residue to infuse into the mass.
What you will be left with is a fibrous jelly mass. Once you have this, you can process it in a way that suits your needs. For what I want to use this, i simply cut the mass into chunks and placed that into a blender with a small amount of fresh water, then blended that in order to extract the juice. Once done, I strained that through a fine sieve to separate the fibers from the juice. At this stage there should be no bitterness left in the product.
The juice will be used for making soaps, while the fibers in this case can be added to make a very gentle hydrating body scrub or lip scrubs. (and I will share some of the recipes on that at a later stage)
As always nature is not without surprises,m as I was cutting up the leaves, this little guy was found hiding in the tip of the leaf where the ends curl up, so I took him back to the aloe plant where I cut the leaves so that he can fund himself another leaf to hide in...