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How to Make Glair
This is my totally-not-period way to get this very ubiquitously period material!
Separate out the egg yolks from egg white.
Whip it to still peaks (usually I use a hand mixer, but we used a SUPER awesome stand mixer here and it got… very stiff peaks… Not sure yet whether that had zero affect on the quality of the glair yet, or if it made it purer bc it trapped more of that protein matrix. But we’ll see.)
Normal people stiff peak egg whites
Our crazy over-beat egg whites
Spread the whipped egg whites on a tilted plate. I say this because if you spread it on flat then try to tilt it to get to the glair later, the WHOLE THING just slides RIGHT OFF. Ask me how I know -_- Also, leave a little room at the down-side for the glair to drain off and gather.
(side view to show tilt)
(top-front view to show spread... it's still tilted tho, promise)
Eventually, the glair starts to settle out. This is the tacky, useful stuff we can use for binder in paints, sealant, flat gilding, etc etc etc. The fluff that remains is all the protein matrix that we don’t care about. It’s the goopy messy stuff, not the liquid tacky awesomeness.
Then you just gather that with a pipette as it flows out. It can take a while. How long you wait really just depends on how patient you are. The yield is pretty high though, and it's cheap to make, so don't waste TOO much time.
We started with 3 eggs, waited ~1.5hrs, and yielded ~45mL/~1.5oz of glair.
(And this pic is for funsies. The top starts to get rigid as the glair settles out. You can see here there is still liquid in there. We just didn't feel like waiting for it is all.)
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