Do you know what happens when you leave for days at a time, don’t harvest your basil plants for daily use, and finally wake up one morning to realize they’ve gone crazy? Yeah, I didn’t either until this morning. I finally decided that the plants were getting too tall and leggy, so I pruned them waaaay back and had to figure out what to do with a Bath and Body Works bag full of herbs.
The most obvious choice is to cook with them. I decided to start with Thai basil and make several batches of basil chicken to freeze (recipe here) in bags. Basil chicken is a fantastic meal to freeze because it’s so tasty and can’t be made with dried basil.
While the basil chicken cooled, I dried some lemon basil, African Blue basil, and rosemary in the oven. I put them on parchment paper at the oven’s lowest setting, 150 degrees, and then checked them until they were all the way dried, stirring if I was afraid they’d burn. They turned out really well! Be sure that if you do this, you wash and DRY them well. That’s the key.
The only one I was disappointed with was the Thai basil, because it just didn’t dry as well. Not only that, but there wasn’t much to the leaves. I think perhaps next time I will turn it into Thai basil pesto cubes like I did the sweet basil. I think it would turn out better.
So that was fun. If I could have bags and bags more of dried lemon basil, I would–it smells so beautiful and is delicious. I’m planning on making lemongrass bahn mi (Vietnamese sandwiches) later with it. Look forward to that stuff!
I had a lot of sweet basil, and I’d been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver and her whole family lived an entire year in the Applachians growing and eating all their own food, or buying it locally (as in, less than an hour away). She would take her basil harvest, put it in the food processor, drizzle in a bit of olive oil, and pulse until it was mixed together. Then she froze it in ice cube trays for use during the winter. That sounded pretty good to me, so I filled the seven-cup food processor about halfway full of sweet basil leaves, gave it a whirl, and then scooped it into trays!
Aaaand I got four cubes. Oh well. Still worth it. I think they’ll have very concentrated basil flavor and could be used in pastas, sauces, chicken–just about anything.
By far my favorite plant to dry, though, was my chocolate mint, affectionately nicknamed “choco-minty.” It’s such a cute little plant with nice, dark green leaves. After you prune it, it smells like Andes and love. I washed and dried choco-minty carefully, then put the leaves in the oven to dry. It smelled incredible the whole time.
Last summer, I made some incredible simple syrup with those chocolate mint leaves and made a decadently huge chocolate mint cake. I don’t really know what I’ll do with the dried mint leaves, but it seems a shame not to use them somehow.
I think that my first herb-drying party was a success, but I do think that it’s important that you have a LOT of leaves in order to do much with them. It’s really better to use them fresh, but this is a nice alternative to making sure they don’t grow out too far.
Hope you try it for yourself! I got the best results with the rosemary and lemon basil.
Little Foodie on the Prairie 