Cooking Snus - When is it Done?

[justintempler]

SkackMan

It's hard to get it right. I haven't made any batches recently. I still have a long way to go before I figure it out.

Part of the reason that homemade snus doesn't stick together is you don't have the right combination of grain sizes. The commercial snus is ground to various specific sizes and then mixed together in specific combinations so that the finer grain tobacco helps hold the larger grains together.

If you want to "cheat" you can use a little corn starch or CMC gum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboxymethyl_cellulose) to act as a binder. Kungssnus has a packet of what they call "special starch" that they include as an optional additive with some of their snussats, I'm guessing it's CMC. Corn starch is probably easier to get your hands on but you want to use tiny amounts of it. If I remember I used 1/8th or 1/16th tsp for a 50 gram can. My snus holds together well enough without it.

I think even the natural "additive free" tobacco still has additives in it. I think the most common ingredient is glycerin to keep the tobacco from drying out. That glycerin adds moisture and (?) may interfere with the tobacco to absorb moisture (?) and also affect the flavor that develops(?) during the cooking process. That glycerin will also make the tobacco sweeter. In normal snusmaking that glycerin isn't added until after the cooking process so I don't know the effects of having glycerin in the tobacco during the cook and how it affects moisture, taste, stickiness, etc. There's just way too many variables to account for especially since we don't know if glycerin is in your tobacco and how much. It's just a crap shoot, trial and error.

I did a trial batch last year using McBarens pipe tobacco and I know for sure it has glycerin it it. I didn't adjust for it ahead of time. The result was too much moisture and snus that was way too sweet

When I get around to making my next batch, I'm going to try an experiment:
Tobacco has natural sugars and the amount of natural sugar varies from variety to variety. Now since I'm a home cooker and don't have access to make a blend of varieties like the big boys do. I'm stuck with the raw tobacco that I have, which is low in sugar. My experiment will involve sweetening up my cook with a little added sugar. For 100 grams of raw tobacco, I'll probably add 8 grams of white sugar and 2 grams of molasses. Since the sugar is in the cooking process it interacts with the tobacco so you have all kinds of possible chemical reactions going on that will affect flavor. I'm hoping it will improve the flavor of my homegrown tobacco and also help with the texture to improve my prillas "stickiness".

You probably don't want to (or maybe you do) add sugar to American Spirit, I'm betting it already has glycerin in it. I'm just putting it out there for the experimenters among us as food for thought.

Good luck.

[JoseJones]

A Nearly Perfect Batch of Snus

Hey, I was previously known as SkackMan (I couldn't remember my password to this account). I wanted to let you all know my second batch was a great success, and a huge thank-you to justintempler for the recipe. Here is how, quite by accident, I made a great-tasting snus with a nearly perfect consistency - it didn't turn to mush:

STEP ONE

Ingredients:

100 grams tobacco (I used additive-free American Spirit)
100 grams distilled water
13 grams salt (I used Morton's Sea Salt with no other additives)
10 grams vegetable glycerin (should be food grade)

Using a coffee grinder, grind the tobacco to roughly the consistency of McCormick ground black pepper (it's okay if there are some slightly larger grains of tobacco here and there). Heat the water and mix in the salt and glycerin, ensuring the salt is completely dissolved in the water. Thoroughly mix the water, salt, and glycerin with the ground tobacco. Place the mix in a mason jar and seal the cap. Sweat the snus at between 65 and 75 degrees Celsius (a slightly higher or lower temperature is fine) for about 72 hours. The snus will turn from light brown to medium-dark brown during this time, but it won't look as dark as finished snus.

Note: I did all of this and became impatient with how long the sweating process was taking, since my tobacco still wasn't the color of snus after three full days. So I took the snus out of the oven and did step two to speed things up. I'm sure that many combinations of cook times/temperatures/methods between step one and two would work, but this worked well for me.

STEP TWO:

Ingredients:

5 grams sodium carbonate

Mix the sodium carbonate VERY THOROUGHLY with the tobacco mix, but now, rather than placing the medium-dark brown mix in the mason jar, place it in small glass baking pan and cover with aluminum foil, ensuring that the foil doesn't touch the snus (I've read that the foil and snus shouldn't touch). Place the baking pan in the oven at the 65 to 75 degrees Celsius for only ONE HOUR. You may want to stir the snus at the half-hour point, though I did not - I just mixed it all very well when the snus was finished. The snus, when stirred thoroughly, will be a very dark brown (similar in color to Granit or Ettan Los). The Maillard reaction is increased thanks to the more alkaline environment produced by adding sodium carbonate.

STEP THREE:

Ingredients:

25 grams of water
water-soluble flavors (if desired)

Mix the water with flavors, if any, and refrigerate in an airtight container immediately. You might instead add the flavors, as justintempler suggested, to 10 ml of ethanol (Everclear, etc.) and blend that in addition to the water, especially if the flavors are not water-soluble (oils).

The result is a snus with about the same moisture level as Offroad Long-Cut seems to have - a little less moisture than most Los snus. But the snus holds together well in the mouth, and the tobacco grains are firm and gritty, some of them, when chewed between the front teeth, much like Granit or Ettan. I used FlavourArt Latakia at 16 drops and FlavourArt Black Currant at 6 drops mixed with the 25 grams of water, and it's really pretty good. I don't use a vaporizer, but I thought I'd get some FlavourArt flavors to add to snus since they're food grade.

I think my experiment was a success primarily because of the reduced moisture, but maybe also the way it was cooked. I don't know. But the result is very good snus considering it is homemade.

[JoseJones]

A photo of my homemade snus.