Making Incense - step by step

1. Find your recipe (or make one!) Get all your ingredients together.

2. Grind each ingredient to a fine powder. For very hard materials, use a coffee grinder. Grind resins last, as they tend to stick to the mortar walls. Sieve after grinding. If it won't pass through a small sieve like the one in the picture, it's not powdered well enough. Grind again! Yes, this is really necessary! Next time, make sure you buy powdered sandalwood instead of sandalwood chips

3. Mix all your powdered ingredients in a bowl. Usually, recipes use "parts", that is, volume, rather than weight. Get a small measuring spoon (say, 1 ml) and you don't have to worry about weighing things at all. 1 part is one spoonful. Voilá!

4. At this stage, you can add essential oils to your mixture if you like. Or any other liquid substance you might want to try.

5. Add water (a little goes a long way) or water-gum tragacanth mix and knead it like a bread-dough. It's best if it has the same feel to it as a good bread-dough: wet, but not too sticky.

6. Take your extruder and put your dough in there. Extrude slowly and carefully. Make as long sticks as possible, you can always cut them afterwards. If you find you cannot extrude your dough: you didn't powder your stuff well enough!! In that case, let your dough dry out and grind it again!

You can also make cones (not shown). It's also possible to make sticks in other ways, e.g. filling up little tubes, or simply rolling the dough, but I found the above to be an easy and elegant method.

7. Let your sticks dry - overnight is enough! Cones take longer though.

Good luck!

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