The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [39]
DOUBLE BOILER AND A FLAME SPREADER
These are most useful for creating gentle-heat water baths and for modifying the heat coming off a stove-top burner. This equipment is useful for low heat extraction processes (i.e., preparing an oil infusion by using the digestion method).
FUNNELS
These are obviously used to get liquids (or dried herbs) into a container through a small opening without also scattering the material around the floor and countertop. I keep a variety of different sized—very small to quite large—standard funnels available for use, along with a wide-throated funnel device designed to help fill canning jars. I also bought a large plastic gasoline funnel at an auto supply store. It has a deep holding basket which is about 12 inches in diameter and a long funnel tube which I cut off about 1 1/2 inches from where it attaches to the basket. This now gives me a 3-inch diameter opening coming out of the basket. This modified device serves as a perfect funnel for transferring large amounts of dried bulk herb from paper or plastic bags into storage jars, which is also what I use the canning funnel for when relocating smaller quantities of dried herb.
MIXING BOWLS
These will be useful for a wide variety of purposes. I hold passionate affection for a 20-inch diameter wooden bowl that I found at a yard sale. I use it predominantly, even when it is obviously too big, just because it is so big—and wooden. I also recommend thin-gauge stainless steel bowls (they usually sell as sets of three concentric, differing diameters). They are available at just about every hardware store and kitchen supply section in town. Large bowls are useful for garbling fresh and dried herbs, for blending and rubbing dried herb compounds, for devising water baths, and for making adequate amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough when needed. I avoid putting oily stuff, like a cube of butter and chocolate chips, in my (great big) wooden bowl—it makes the wood permanently sticky, which complicates things when working with dry, powdery plant materials.
SCALES
Get yourself a metric scale. You can buy cheap, funky ones at kitchen supply and department stores, but the problem with these is that they normally don’t register very accurately on the light end of the scale (where you will probably be doing much of your work), and they usually come with an absurdly small holding container that is not very practical when one is attempting to weigh unruly, bulky botanicals. So, I suggest that in time you buy a triple beam scale that is accurate down to a gram weight and can counterbalance a substantially sized holding basket. You’ll appreciate this expenditure, and you’ll enjoy your affluence. Pottery and ceramic supply stores sell triple beam scales. There are electric (battery-powered) scales also available in kitchen supply stores. They are accurate, cheaper than triple beams, and useful when working on the road.
Celebrate the New Age—go metric.
POURING DEVICES
Glass percolator coffee pot bottoms are my favorite and most sought after device to use for pouring herbal liquids. I get pushier than the teens in line for fake IDs when I see one of these well-spouted containers sitting as yet unclaimed in a yard sale or at a flea market. These glass sculptures were obviously designed by folks who knew what is required to pour blissfully with carefree confidence. The vast majority of spouted measuring cups and other spouted apparatus sold in stores today are obviously designed by the same folks who put together computer software manuals; they (the manuals and the pouring spouts) are ineffectual, having virtually nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else’s reality. I suggest you hunt around for containers that have functional pouring spouts; shun and discard those that don’t. Herbal extracts are too precious to squander as spillage and drip-page, and