I'm asking for medicinal herbs, but figured this is the best place to ask

If a plant has both hydrophilic and lipophilic compounds that are of interest, can I just boil everything up like a tea but add butter/coconut oil during the boil to pull everything? And then just drink it?

Thanks!

Just off the top of my head, I think that you wouldn't have an issue, but methinks there might be an issue with potency of the lipophilic compounds being absorbed due to the inability to mix fats and water. I wonder if perhaps either making two different batches and combining them, or using a tea bag of some sorts, extract with water, press dry, then extract with fats or vice versa. Either way, though, there may be some of the compound that doesn't make it's way into your tea mixture simply due to this hitch.

Making it into an ethanolic tincture can address this issue. Quite understandably, some find that to be a less desirable approach.

A two stage process can also be applied. Knowing exactly which plant(s) you wish to process would also help in guiding towards the best approach to use.

I'm interested in taking red salvia (salvia miltiorrhiza) root at ~10-30g/day. So... that's a LOT of plant material.

I was really hoping I could avoid tincturing because 1) I don't want to wait two months 2) that's a ton of alcohol and 3) that's a ton of plant material.

I have a good quality tincture that I purchased, but the math works out to 1.5g/plant matter for a 30 day supply. It's not economical at all. Even if it were economical, I would have to be ingesting like a flask of alcohol a day to hit 10g.

Hence me wondering if I could steadily stir a decoction with some butter for 20-30 minutes to make something like a red salvia bhang (then most likely reduce, agitate, and split into some ice cube trays for pre-measured daily dosing).

Would tincturing be the better move?

Or water cook to get the roots nice and mushy, hopefully they mush down enough for an oil cook, or... something?, and then maybe a 3rd quick hot water cook to try and get the oil out of the root?

I can't find any traditional methods of preparation outside of hot water extraction, but there is lots of pubmed data about hot water extraction doesn't pull all the goodies.

Dan shen. OK. I could do with some of that myself
Yes, that is traditionally used as a decoction or as a tincture.


What looks best to me is your idea to make the decoction as per the usual practice and then take the boiled roots and cook them in ghee. Hot pressing might be a good way to get the remnants out if you were happy setting up a suitable press arrangement. The trouble is there's no safety information about this kind of preparation so you'd have to proceed very carefully, perhaps testing it out topically at first.


Tincturing need not take two months, btw. If you can powder your material and keep it hand hot it should be ready in a day or two. The suggested daily dose for the tincture is 2-5mL but it looks like you're aiming for doubling that. Are you sure it's necessary? Even so, 10mL of tincture is equivalent to one shot of premium vodka if you're using 80% abv spirit.

It seems that either your tincture is something on the dilute side, or your extrapolations between usage of decocted plant material and the volume of tincture equivalent to that are not valid. I suspect you would need to use an amount of tincture corresponding to a lower amount of plant material because the tincture extracts the active compounds more effectively - viz what you mention about the pubmed data.