How to Grow Tobacco

Timber Wolf fine cut natural is 52% water & Longhorn FC natural is 53.5% according to the Swedish Match product ingredient page. You can spread the snuff out on waxed paper, or something similar, and let it air at room temperature to dry it out to the correct moisture content. I just take the lid off the snoose container and let it dry out in the icebox, but not everyone's wife is as tolerant as mine.

Yea 50% moisture sounds aabout right, mine went from 3 oz. to 20 oz. and it's too wet, got it drying on paper plates now. First taste test, not too bad, but not Timberwolf either! A little strong on the Turkish sampson, too light on the burley. But about right on the saltiness and maybe needs a little more sugar or molasses. The formula i used was this (for a 100 gm ground and sifted leaf):
Water - 1 cup
Leaf baccy - 50 gms.
Salt - 25 gms.
Soda - 1/4 tsp
Sugar - 1 tbs
Molasses - 1 tbs.
Vanilla extract - 1/4 tsp
Simmered water mixture for 1/2 hour, bagged it in qt. zip loc and put it in the sun for 5 days.
Then sqeezed the leaf juice into a bowl and added the 100 gms. of fine ground tobacco, mixed it and put it into a 1 gal zip loc in the refrig for 5 more days.
IMHO it needs a little more salt and molasses for my taste.
Texture is similar to Timberwolf but not as gritty as Copenhagen. I think Cop must add some kind of silica or other grit to enhance nic uptake. Also, Cop obviously uses a more aged tobacco than Timberwolf, tastes more refined, but i'm not used to the grit anymore.
Give it a try dippers, it sure beats $4/oz. store bought!
Neal

Lipan, Are you using 100grams ground and sifted PLUS 50grams leafy?
Tnx,
rc

Yes, that's 50 + 100 gms. Of course the first 50 gets squeezed out and thrown away, so you really only have 100 gms. of solids (ground and sifted tobacco).

I think the "grittiness" in Copenhagen is due to additional stems being added to the tobacco blend & the flavor definitely ain't what it used to be. More like Kayak than a premium quality product. Tried my own hand at making snus last weekend. Moistened about a cup and a half of tobacco with a salt solution (2 tsp salt to a cup of hot water) and put it the oven @ 200oF for 24 hours. Did have stir it up and remoisten after about 7 hours. After 24 hours, moistened it again with a saturated baking soda solution back in the oven for another 7 hours. Tasted a lot like Grov snus and I flavored it with a little lemon extract. Been dipping it all week with a lot less burn and irritation than I get from American dip and no bleeding gums like I get from Swedish snus. Next time I'll use better tobacco, less soda and sweat it for a full 12 hours after adding the alkali.

Snuff:
Was your cup and a half of tobacco already ground and sized when you added it to the salt solution, or did you use whole leaf at that stage? I used the food processor to grind up the leaf and then passed it thru a kitchen sifter. Seemed to give a good particle size for dip.
My first mixture is a light brown color that smells like the turkish sampson that it mainly is. I need to use a darker variety and get some age on it to get the flavor that I want. I am hoping that a combo of silk leaf and burley will help out the flavor, once it is fermented and aged.

If you used the oven at 200 degrees, couldn't you use a crock pot and do it outside, maybe for a slightly longer time? I wouldn't want my casarole dishes to smell like tobacco, but maybe that's just me! JMHO.
Thanks for the feedback and advice, casing up a new batch with mostly burley for the next trial (silk leaf not ready yet).
Neal

my Brother dips or uses snuff, he enjoys the nic kick an the sweet flavor of snuff even the natural flavored snuff, i'd like to come up with a "blend" with maybe just a little bit of sweetness for him to try, being he lets me use a 2 acre field of his to grow my excess baccy on. he breaks it up with the tractor an gets it ready to plant every year but wont allow me to buy tractor fuel or pay him for his time. must be a Brother thing. either way if i could come up with a good taste'n snuff with a nic kick from hell, i dont think he'd refuse it.

Freedom:
Don't remember what you're growin, but a kick mix needs stronger baccy than turkish, that's for sure. I'm still tinkering with flavors, added more salt, sugar and molasses to the mix listed above. Have it sitting in a crock pot for a few days, then back in the fridge. I don't have mold inhibitor in it, so it can't sit out too long. Let ya'll know how it turns out.
Neal

Edited: Crock pot too hot, took it out and back in the fridge til i have time to fool with it.

Great thread!
...think I'll go back and read the whole thing over again.
rc

lipantxguy this year i growed my turkish, havana 608, burley, kentucky something,... cuban, rustica, penn red. an some virgina something... i'd have to look an see what the virgina an kentucky was.

The tobacco was already ground and sieved. It was actually a couple of nasal snuff experiments that failed plus some very old whole leaf and RYO tobacco. I wanted to see what result I'd get from using less than prime tobacco. I've got another batch in the oven made from year old cigar leaf. The problem with using a crockpot is that the tobacco dries out on the bottom and sides of the pot (about like concrete). I used to float a sealed container on water inside the crockpot. It worked fairly well, but the small amount of water evaporates pretty quickly. The oven I use is a Rival roaster oven that cost less than $25 at Walmart. I just about paid for it by not buying dip last week. Re: Sweetening; I was reading on a Swedish snus site that one man was using 2 tbs of bakery syrup to 500 grams of tobacco.

Thanks Snuff: ditto on the crock pot. Good idea about the small oven, I could put the food processor and a portable oven out on the back porch to get the whole process out of the kitchen. That would make my wife v-e-r-y happy (or less grouchy). Re: sweetning will vary with taste, 2 tbs per 500 gms. would be less than half what i'm using. But that was cane sugar and you mentioned bakery syrup. I'll get back to you after I taste test the 2 tbs. of cane per 100 gms. of tobacco.
Neal

Tested the mix with more sugar and molasses, usable but not what I was hoping for. Still too much of what I think is the Turkish tobacco smell and taste, kind of light and aromatic. I have some burley curing and I need to repeat the same basic recipe with a stronger tobacco blend. I also have some sand lugs that are a mix of silk leaf, burley and turkish. The turkish leaves are smaller, and along with the smell I should be able to reduce or eliminate them from the blend for the next batch.
The texture did come out very similar to store bought, using the food processor and then sifting it through a strainer. At least that part was sucessful, and I was left with a small pile of courser stems and leaves that could be smoked if brought into proper case I suppose.
The color of the mix is a light brown, even with a lot of moisture. I'm guessin that it reflects the type of tobacco used. I need to concentrate next year on a darker tobacco, cause even my sand lugs this year are a light brown color.
So it's back to the drawing board for a stronger blend.
Neal

That light color might mean that you're not cooking the tobacco long enough. I've got the opposite problem. I seriously over cooked my last 2 batches and they were almost black and the taste is almost awful. Still trying to figure out what I did wrong.

I'm waiting for my burley to age a bit so I can make a mainly burley mix. Meantime i'm using my first batch that has aged a bit and has just a slight Turkish taste. Or maybe i'm getting used to it, one. Either way it's usable and has moderate nicotine. At least I don't feel the need for anything else, and i'm a 50 year tobacco user.
What types of tobacco did you use and how long did you simmer it for? And did you age it after? For sure ageing (and probably fermenting) is a big part of the commercial tobacco taste.
Good luck and keep in touch.
Neal