A few weeks ago I set a Harmala* extraction in motion. Ground up the seeds, did the acid boil and then ran into problems: filtering was near impossible because no matter how coarse cotton I stuffed in there, it got stuck within 5 seconds. So I decided to just salt whatever I had in there, decant it and then re-dissolve the Harmalas inside an old pillow case as this apparently filters out most of the gunk.

In short, I forgot about the extract until I at some point dived into my fridge and found this somewhere sitting in the back. The top was fully dry but covered with a fine layer of white dust, what appears to be mycelium or mold. Under the crusty top it's still moist.

My question is: can I still save my extract without any health risks? I was thinking about re-dissolving it in acidified water, filter it and then throw in some lye, decant and re-dissolve and salt(twice to eliminate any residual lye).

Would this clean up my end product enough or should I just consider this an expensive lesson in extracting Harmalas and toss it all?

* Firefox' dictionary suggests that I use 'alarm' or 'halal' there. HA!

If that is in fact mycellium then you need to fruit that SHIT!

Fruiting unknown fungi spores? No thank you, as a lot of fungi species produce toxic fumes or toxic fruit bodies. Apart from ruining my fridge / food, I'm also endangering myself. No thanks.

Yea don't really fruit that 'shit'. I'd thought you would take that as a joke! I wonder if you can spray it down with IPA to kill it which should then evap off of the top and then continue to do what you are saying

Not even.

You can sure kill the fungus by a million methods without harming the alkaloids (lye will also do, same goes for prolonged (i.e. 1+ hour of boiling) but you gotta make sure that your end product is not tainted with any fungal compounds (see mycotoxins) that you may end up ingesting. Since you're totally unaware about the nature of any toxins, it is impossible to rule them out without some analytical assay.

The safest way is to throw it out and consider it a lesson, or gamble with yourself a bit, the latter not being very recommended of course.