Feijoa Fruit Hydrosol Distilled At Our Apothecary

One of my favorite online hang outs is a foraging group on FB. There’s a lot of knowledge, helpful hints and curious folks asking some good questions. This is where I learned about a feijoa fruit producing tree here in my city. Over the years here in California, I found a few trees in both Berkley and here in a magic garden in the middle of my city. The trees have plenty of spring time flowers which I snack but they never produce fruit. I wanted to taste fresh picked fruit for as long as I can remember, dating back to the mid 2000s when I would beg grocery stores in Canada to import them for me. They would arrive hard, tasteless and deeply disappointing as any food with a thousand or so miles on them would. I tried distilling the flowers last year but it was one of those wild card distillations that didn’t work out. The flowers are better as a foraging snack or in a salad ( and oh, are they pretty in a salad).

Last fall, Lady Luck batted an eye when a fellow forager in my group posted a photo asking about them. I quickly found out where they were and went to harvest what I could the next morning. Three glorious trees hung heavy with feijoa perfumed fruit. Unconfined, I ate until they started to sensitize my teeth and then filled my harvesting baskets. As with the majority  of my distillations, I didn’t know how I was going to produce them and I wasn’t even sure the fruit wouldn’t turn to complete mush when steam hit them. Fruit is unforgiving in a still unless its mash for moonshine but of course that’s a whole other product. The distillation was in every sense a wild card; but one of the most surprising scent profiles I’ve experienced to date. It immediately smelled like ylang ylang hydrosol – the one I import from the Philippines to be exact. I gave it a couple of weeks in the event I was overexubernt but it only became finer in ylang ylang notes. I’m still working on the properties of feijoa hydrosol other than as a skin toner but for me, its such a special aroma, I’m kind of cool about that alone.

Feijoa Distillation