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I have peppermint/mint growing in my garden backyard. I want to make mint candies for children and in one of the YouTube videos they have menthol crystal as one of the ingredients for mint candies so I am wondering how to make Menthol Crystal from fresh mint leaves ?

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  • This is an interesting question. I have wondered myself about mint in gum.
    – Jolenealaska
    Nov 4, 2017 at 12:17
  • As a chemist I would not proceed this way unless you have an entire garden of mint. Not to say the equipment to extract and recrystallise the menthol. Which obviously you have not else you wouldn't have ask. Perhaps you can find alternatives as using a syrup prepared with the leaves. It should be possible.
    – Alchimista
    Nov 4, 2017 at 12:43
  • @Stephie. It is ok. ;)
    – Alchimista
    Nov 4, 2017 at 13:06
  • It seems like you're finding recipes that rely on commercially produced menthol, likely artificial. You might want to change how you're searching, look for recipes using mint (not menthol) or even explicitly look for fresh mint, so that you'll find things that actually use what you have.
    – Cascabel
    Nov 4, 2017 at 16:09
  • Hello, you just repeated the question you posted last week. We insist on having each question only once, and not needing people to repeat the same information (or worse, separate different information among a lot of questions) so we close duplicates.
    – rumtscho
    Nov 4, 2017 at 18:59

2 Answers 2

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Every recipe I’ve seen asks for mint extract, which is mint that has had the flavors removed by steam distillation. This is not very difficult to do if you purchase some glass distillation equipment from a science supply company. There would be no need to further process it to pure menthol and crystallize. There are plenty of videos on YouTube which demonstrate essential oil distillation. Making crystalline menthol would likely involve solvent extraction, and could produce a toxic finished product if the menthol were not sufficiently dried.

There was a really good answer to the version of the question you asked last week.

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You don’t, unless you have extensive chemical equipment and knowledge (and in that case, you probably wouldn’t be asking here).

Pure menthol is produced either synthetically or from the essential oil of peppermint in a rather complex process. Details for example in the link above.

As a cook and gardener, you would have to get the essential oil before even attempting that and this is already pretty complicated. You need a lot (a huge lot-lot) of mint for just a few drops of oil and a complex extraction process as well.

So you better find another use for your garden mint.

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  • actually the process is not very complicated - see my answer from last week in the duplicate target. Still impractical though.
    – rumtscho
    Nov 4, 2017 at 18:59
  • Menthol is a crystal, not an oil at around room temp. I have a 500ml flask with about 10 g of synthetic menthol sitting on my window sill. Over the course of a year, the crystals will turn to needles which grow and shrink, and move around in the bottle. I grow several different mints for tea and flavoring, but for menthol, synthetic is the way to go. Easily found online. If you must make your own xyls there's a pate t to be found under menthol patent. Nov 5, 2017 at 0:22

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