Lilac smell of Spring. That heady smell is intoxicating, elusive, hard to describe and yet everyone knows exactly what Lilacs smell like. I wanted to capture that smell. Lilac Hydrosol.  Sounds simple enough and would be heavenly to have a bottle of hydrosol that smelled like lilacs.  

I snipped all the lilacs off of about 6 bushes.  In hindsight, I should have only did enough for one to try it.  Apparently people have been trying to capture the elusive delicate scent of lilacs forever.  There is no essential oil of lilac because lilacs do not have any essential oil to release during distillation.  Any lilac essential oil you may find is synthetic. The delicate flowers are damaged in heat.  Steam distillation is too high of a temperature and that lilac smell seems to just disappear.  Any heat appears to be too much and thinking about it, as soon as Summer Heat hits the lilacs just disappear. Heat damages the delicate blossoms and changes the scent composition.  I didn’t know that before the distillation.

I did one distillation and have nearly a quart.  It has some smell but doesn’t scream lilac.  I will let it settle and smell it later.  Hydrosols always change with time and settle.  I have had a few distillations where I hated it for 6 months before it changed enough that it was lovely again.  But honestly, I am not holding out a lot of hope for this experiment.  It smells green and nothing like Lilac scent I was hoping to capture.

But oh my goodness, what am I supposed to do with all these lilac flowers?  Remember I snipped off the flowers from SIX bushes?  I looked up a few options and it seems you can try enfleurage as most other preparations don’t work for this flower. 

Enfleurage is a French technique of pressing flowers into animal fat to capture the delicate scent.  Works with lilacs, violets, roses and other similar delicate flowers.  I didn’t have animal fat but I did have organic coconut oil.  It is a cold pressed oil and was all natural so still carries some of the coconut smell.  It is possible that the coconut could interfere with the lilac smell but it may also complement it if I can get enough of the lilac pressed into the coconut oil.  Either way, coconut oil is a lovely smell on its own so I will still be able to use it if the lilac smell is weak.  

It will be better than last year’s experiment when I put the lilac flowers into oil to infuse. That was such a failure that I threw it all out.  I tried infusing it into organic olive oil. It just smelled like olive oil and turned a weird yellow color. I tossed a gallon of that expensive oil last year and didn’t want to do that again.  You can infuse it in oil but I believe you would need to use an oil that had no scent if you wanted to pick up any lilac smell.  I still can’t explain the weird dark yellow colour.

I ended up using about 22 oz of coconut oil across all three pans that I set up.  I had too many flowers and not enough oil or pans to do it.  But I had intended on distilling it all when I cut such a large amount of flowers. This hasn’t been a very successful experiment so far.  I did however learn another method of working with flowers.  Pressing flowers into fat and depending on how it goes, I will try it again with my roses and perhaps the violets as well.  If this enfleurage works for the lilac flowers, I can’t wait until next year to try it again with better preparation.  I cut most of the flowers off my lilac bushes and should do this enfleurage a couple of times. Than I need to trim the bushes back so they can grow new flowers for next year.  Next year’s flowers start growing almost as soon as the current flowers fade on lilac bushes.  I didn’t prune the bushes or dead head the flowers last year, and this year’s flowers were kind of reduced from last year.  

Back to the Lilac Enfleurage.  I decided to take the flowers out last night and see how it was going.  I did check it before and it smelled wonderful and looked good.  Last night, not so much.  The colour was browning and weird.  And as soon as I unwrapped it, I could smell it was spoiling.  It had started to ferment.  Reminded me a little of the smell of an seriously over ripe banana. That didn’t go to plan either.  I had to scrape that all into the trash and wash everything up well before disinfecting.  

I did learn something with this Enfleurage though.  It is important to have your preparation done before picking the flowers as the delicate blossoms start to lose their scent almost immediately.  Out of the three trays I set up, one was done almost correct.  It is important to let the fat solidify and cool before adding the blossoms.  In two trays, the fat was still pretty liquid so the blossoms sank into it.  It was the middle of the night and I was impatient and exhausted because it was my plan B!

The tray that had cooled and gone solid again had the flowers pressed on top of the fat correctly. I could scrap it off with a fork.  I smelled lilac, coconut, and the fermented smell.  Three distinct smells. In the two other trays, all I could smell was the fermentation.  It was stronger with those two trays than the first tray.  I believe it is important to take the blossoms off each day and repress fresh flowers into the fat.  Next time, I need to prep my fat first, than pick the flowers, and than press them. I need to change the flowers every day.  It is a longer process that takes repeated pressings to get the smell into the fat.  If any of the other flowers can be distilled or infused into oil, that will be the route that I will go in future.  Lilacs may only work with Enfleurage so if I want Lilacs I will need to try again.