My suspicion is that the natural volatiles will fly away with faster evaporation, and even my pink salt (or part of it) has become apparent in the experiment that I'm running, so I'm sure you will see the same or better with plant salts.
Unfortunately, the faster you heat them, the more chance of busting glassware, so use chips. I need to smash up a glass bottle around here and use the chards next time. Finding that salts are volatizing will be easy, Fixing the volatiles perhaps not so much. My collection bottle tastes of water, so I plan to put it on a very slow evaporation and cover the top with a filter to let the gasses out and prevent debris from entering. This was all distilled water, so in theory, nothing should be left after evaporation, not even spots.
If the above is true, then we must use the utmost caution at recrystallizing the leeched salts, as drying them too quickly will be tossing the baby out with the bathwater. Take those leeched, purified salts (calination should be okay if they are dry) and boil of the dragons in a hot fire, and collect the steam.
However you set it up, I would love to hear your results. For me, it's not the measurement that's important of how much, but what ends up in the retort, and it's qualities. If this natural volatile is always present and interesting, then we'll know how to collect more![]()
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