Long cut dip using nordic snus recipe

[hotrod]

For the last two years I've been using a Nordic country recipe that has since been pulled from the net. My preferred cut is long cut but have always loved the Swedish style/flavor of their snus. Here my recipe in pdf format makes 6.5lbs or 50 tins good for 1/2 year at 2.40 a tin.

Dip-Snus-Tobacco-Recipe-c.pdf

[Link dead]

 

[Jitterbugdude]

Man, That's a hell of a lot of work for making snus. Most of the snus recipes posted here take about 15 minutes of prep time. After the initial prep the snus is cooked for anywhere from about 24 hrs to about a week.

 

[DGBAMA]

Nice write-up........Really nice grow pics too.

 

[hotrod]

Man, That's a hell of a lot of work for making snus. Most of the snus recipes posted here take about 15 minutes of prep time. After the initial prep the snus is cooked for anywhere from about 24 hrs to about a week.

Yes, Jitterbugdude, it does take time to make a large supply of dip. Stripping ~72 leaves of stems and veins and manually shredding them is the bulk of labour. This amount of work really requires the desire to satisfy that nicotine urge. If you were to reduce the size of the recipe to say a half a pound of raw leaves, prepping 9 leaves would take under 1hr which I think is right in line with other recipes if they were to manually shred the tobacco. Grinding the dry leaves into dust is fast in a food processor, you could half my time to 30 minutes but that is less than a months supply of dip.

Nice write-up........Really nice grow pics too.

Growing and curing tobacco is a major undertaking labour wise, I attempted it only once just to say I did it but never again. My wife and neighbors now know for sure that I'm nuts!

 

[deluxestogie]

Growing and curing tobacco is a major undertaking labour wise, I attempted it only once just to say I did it but never again.

Remarkable! You are the only human I'm aware of who possesses a natural immunity to the tobacco growing bug.

Bob

 

[hotrod]

Remarkable! You are the only human I'm aware of who possesses a natural immunity to the tobacco growing bug.

Bob

The growing was fine, it was my attempt to Fire cure the baccy that was an undertaking. Needless to say I have 30lbs of very lightly fire cured burley and Virginia, I used my metal shed, a 10 gal steel drum and nice maple wood. I will start using some to stretch my 8lbs annual purchase of quality Fire Cured tobacco. I've got plenty of stock with the current batch of homegrown, no need to grow again.

 

[deluxestogie]

Adequate fire-curing is a substantial project. I rigged a vented, galvanized trash can to the top of a Brinkman smoker. After 2 and 3 firings a day, for 30 consecutive days, I managed to get about 1 hand of nicely fired Shirazi. I had been aiming for "Latakia," but didn't even come close. I believe that was in 2011. It's tasty and smoky, but nothing like KY dark-fired. I think it is missing the soot.

If you're in the US (speaking to hotrod), and you're interested, PM your mailing info, and I'll send you a sample.

Bob

 

[hotrod]

Thanks for the offer Bob but I'm in Canada. Something you said struck me as my downfall when I tried to fire cure... "hand" My shed was so tightly packed because I primed the leaves as they came in, threaded them and hung them up across the shed and fired when harvest was complete and golden. Now I'm thinking I should have hung a quarter of my harvest with an inch spacing between leaves then the fire curing may have worked better, left the rest as air cured.

Soot is nasty (I think), I can't believe that what's missing. I would rather believe that the temperature wasn't held hot enough (170f) long enough to get a good "maillard reaction" happening. The best smoke is nearly invisible from a good wood combustion fire so I thought and use for meat and what I tried to accomplish when I fired the tobacco, was I wrong?

 

[hotrod]

I must have replied before you added the pics. That's some nice looking fire curing, do you remember what temperature you were able to hold in your modified smoker?

 

[deluxestogie]

I aimed for "cold" smoking (like for cheese), keeping the chamber temp below 130ºF. Within the Brinkman, a grill shelf midway down held a large pot of water to buffer the temp. The fires were tiny charcoal fires, with perforated foil packs of wood kindling resting on the charcoal. Lots of smoke; not much heat.

My reason for limiting the max temp was to avoid denaturing (@149ºF) the oxidase enzymes in the leaf, so it would continue to age.

Most fire cures in Kentucky are done over banked hardwood fires that are smothered in hardwood sawdust. So I think their max temp is fairly low.

Bob

 

[RyanM22]

How does washing affect nicotine content?

 

[Jitterbugdude]

How does washing affect nicotine content?

It removes most, if not all of it.

 

[hotrod]

It removes most, if not all of it.

I beg to differ. We are talking about mere moments that the leaf is submerged in the water in comparison to the time it spent outdoors being rained on. Sure Nicotine is a hygroscopic, oily liquid that is miscible with water in its base form but its not all sitting on the epidermis waiting to wash off.

 

[deluxestogie]

If the leaf is green, washing has minimal effect on nicotine (it removes the trichome-secreted nicotine). Washing color-cured leaf begins dissolving the laminar nicotine, which is the brown color that leaches into the liquid (oxidized nicotine). The longer it remains submerged, the closer the leaf-water system reaches a nicotine concentration equilibrium. Since this equilibrium may be considered directly mass dependent, the water wins.

Bob

 

[Jitterbugdude]

All I can say is I had some potent tobacco that I soaked in water, squeezed the water out and let dry. The tobacco was essentially nicotine free.

 

[hotrod]

All I can say is I had some potent tobacco that I soaked in water, squeezed the water out and let dry. The tobacco was essentially nicotine free.

Soaking for any length of time and then squeezing out the excess liquid will undoubtedly reduce the nicotine to a very low value. No one here is providing quantifiable values. So let me add my two cents about what happened to your tobacco; By soaking it and removing the excess liquid not only did you remove a lot of nicotine but you also removed the alkaline buffer and lowered PH to neutral or acid so that whatever nicotine left wasn’t freely available. Instead of soaking I would lower the ph of a strong dip with an acid, like apple cider vinegar.

I can’t give the exact % of nicotine in my dip because I’m not willing to spent the $150.00 for testing. My dip at PH 8.5 “knocks the socks off” of nearly any Swedish snus I have tried, and friends have heart palpitations after a ~dozen minutes.

 

[MikeHaggarSSBM]

Could you repost the PDF?

 

[deluxestogie]

It's been 4 years since Hotrod has made any posts on this forum.

Bob