Old thread but I am enjoying the new content.
I like to do a partial blend of blanched then shocked mint leaves primarily for the nice color it adds. This past summer I tested 3 mint sorbets with different mints from my garden, so it was not too standardized. But I did one full heat infusion, one full cold blend, and one at 3/4 infusion 1/4 blend. I appreciated the mix one the best. I do feel like color is an important component of flavor even if the infusion has a better extraction of the typical mint flavor. I've done this technique with basil as well and really enjoyed it.
Has anyone used essential oils as flavoring? My main question is about the safety of essential oils that aren't the usual ones at the grocery store (orange, lemon etc.). While I'd like to use fresh ingredients, sometimes the essential oils open up the flavor palette to things that'd be more difficult to source (cedar, fir, bergamot). I have a douglas fir oil I'd consider using. I understand no one can really definitively comment on this, especially considering different manufacturers will produce it in different ways, and none are "food approved", but how do people feel about their usage? I first got this idea after seeing it done in The Fat Duck cookbook (although Heston I'm sure has access to far higher quality oils, or perhaps would make his own from a rotavap). There was a commercial food supplier here in Canada that was selling their own line of essential oils for about a year, which appeared to be thinly veiled as "ok for food use even though we won't say it", sadly I did not get to buy as many of these as I wanted before they discontinued the line, but this is where my douglas fir oil is from. I believe if you consume one of these oils and called poison control they would most likely just tell you to dilute with a ton of water and not worry too much (which is basically what you would do when adding a drop to a liter of ice cream), but I wonder about their long term safety
