It is always great to make your own stuff. Just like cooking, making your own shisha tobacco is an art of its own. The ingredients you will need to make shisha tobacco are fairly simple: Tobacco leaves, molasses or honey, glycerin, and flavorings.
1. Soak the dried Tobacco
The first step is to soak the dried tobacco in water to rehydrate it, make it pliable, and remove a little bit of the nicotine content. The longer you soak, the fewer flavors it will add to the final product and more nicotine will be taken out. Change the water every 30 minutes or so, until you feel you’ve reached your desired level of washing.
2. Strip out the Stems and Chop the Leaves
If you are using whole leaves then you need to strip out the stems to avoid bitterness, overly high nicotine content, and unpleasant flavors. You can do this by hand, but a sharp knife and a cutting board can be really helpful. After the spines are stripped, bunch the tobacco up together, squeeze it into one block, and cut it up with your sharp knife. You can make it as a course or as fine as you want.
3. Add honey/ molasses and flavorings
The common ratio used for molasses or honey is 3 to 1. For every 3 grams of tobacco, use 1 gram of molasses or honey, for example, 300 grams of dried tobacco takes about 100 grams of honey. Sometimes it’s more sometimes it’s less depending on the style of tobacco and the type of flavoring. Mix the honey/molasses, all the flavorings you want to use, and about 30g of glycerin per 300 grams of tobacco in a bowl and add the tobacco. Start light with the flavorings. Some of them are super strong. A tablespoon is all you need to start. Mix it up with wet hands and take a whiff. If it smells good put it in a Tupperware container to sit overnight.
If you want to take it to the next level you can bake the tobacco before adding the flavorings to help the glycerin and molasses/honey soak into the leaves. You can wrap all of the tobacco and molasses/ honey mix in tin foil and bake it at a warm (not hot) temperature for an hour or so. After that, then add your flavorings and let them blend together overnight.
4. Wait a day
The next day, if the consistency seems right and it smells good, load up a bowl and smoke it. If it’s dry add more honey or molasses. If you don’t like the flavor add some more until you get it right. It can take up to a week or more for the flavors to really mellow out and come together into their final form, so be patient. It’s all about preference but it’s really as simple as that.
