sassafras sun tea
I had an order of sassafras tea from a favorite herb supplier of mine, so, after reading up on reusing pickle jars/mason jars for sun tea on another crafter’s blog, I decided to try it myself but use sassafras leaf instead of black tea.
The result was peculiar: the sassafras gave out what was almost a sap, it was so gooey and sticky. Even after diluting it a bit, there was still an odd, saplike quality to it. So I decided to go and read what that sap stuff was.
On first reading, I learned two things:
1. It gets used as a thickener in traditional gumbos.
2. Sassafras contains safrole, which was determined to be cancer causing back in the 1960s.
By that time I had ingested several glasses of it, so it threw me into a blind panic. Denial causes me to reread things. In this case, that was good.
I read that the safrole is found in the bark and root – that the leaf has less than .005% of the dose required to be cancer causing. I could eat an entire tree’s leaves and it would still take me a long time to get that dosing.
It also turns out that trying it as sun tea was a good instinct – apparently if you hit sassafras leaf with boiling water, it just turns to gum. Fine if you want to thicken a shrimp sauce but a bit weird if you just want a nice cup of tea.
