None of Your Beeswax

I have been toying with the idea of playing with beeswax...lip balm, moisturizers, whatever. Having extremely sensitive and dry skin, the thought of having minimal ingredients was appealing to me. Plus, making mud pies is one of the delights of life.

And a source of beeswax was readily available: my favorite local apiarists Brigida and Federico! I mentioned it to them ages ago, and we eventually got it together. He gave me a rather unappealing double-bagged mush: he explained it was particularly special because it was the wax the bees use as the stopper rather than in the comb (I think), and blah blah blah. That's the extent of my technical knowledge, but I am sure that he knows what he's talking about.

So I had this nasty gloopy chunky stuff to deal with. Obviously, the first thing to do was to melt it down for separation or amalgamation. One way or another, this stuff had to be converted into something. I did research enough to tell me that you must use a double-boiler with beeswax, but the recipes I'd seen expected you to start with beeswax, not crumbly gloopy stuff in a bag.

Hm. Double boiler. That involved a cheapy pan from our other apartment and one of my larger pots for the bain marie. I transferred the clumpy, oozy stuff into the pan, and started heating. It was fascinating: it liquified into this clear-looking/brown grainy mixture that I then strained into a container.

Not a success.

I ended up with a nasty strainer, honey on the bottom, and a bunch of crumbly, nasty brown stuff with a little yellow wax on top. Well, that didn't work out so well! I thought perhaps reheating would release more wax from the brown, grainy mass. I retrieved it from the top of the honey (decanting the honey into a jar), and tried again. This go-round, I got a lot more of the luscious, rich yellow wax. But how to separate at the interface?

Time for more research. The first sentence hit my eye, menacingly: "Use only disposable items, because everything you use for wax separation will be irrecoverable." Well, hadn't used my disposable kitchen (!), and so far the body count was:

1 Pyrex measuring cup, imported from the US (therefore not easily replaceable)
1 large sieve
1 serving bowl
1 paring knife (my favorite, of course)
1 rubber spatula
1 frying pan
1 smaller pot
1 mug
2 spoons

Oh, dear.

The author did go on to suggest using cardboard containers (her example was a milk carton, but milk here only comes in plastic; I went native and used a cardboard tomato sauce container) to receive the wax, and cheesecloth to filter the liquid. She also confirmed my suspicion that the yucky brown crumbly stuff was destined for the trash.

Time to find cheesecloth. Luckily, I found it fairly quickly at a local cloth store, since it's not considered "home goods."

The third wax separation session took a while to get to, because of life. But it went reasonably well. I have some lovely yellow wax! I had a remainder to deal with that waited on a (much delayed) session that happened tonight. The reason for the delay, frankly, was that I knew that right after finishing it, cleaning all the utensils would be a normal expectation. And I was daunted by the cleanup, to put it mildly.

I needn't have worried. After wax separation, I followed my hunch to use baking soda and boiling water. Apart from the sieve (which I couldn't be bothered to try, to tell the truth), everything came clean beautifully and quickly after a soak!

The kitchen is completely back in business, and we have a pile of beeswax to use and honey to eat!

Sweetly,

Alexandra