Drying and Storing Basil

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here. If you love basil as much as I do, and you want to make use of it in the winter as much as you do in the summer, I've got a great tip for you. Stay tuned. Basil is an incredible summertime herb. You can use it for all sorts of things, bruschetta, pesto, caprese salad, and the list goes on and on. But there's one fallback to this frost tender herb, and that is it's frost tender. So the first time the freeze hits, it's gone. Now we grow several different varieties around our place. This is one of our beds that we have here, and we harvest basil ongoing, both for fresh use as well as for drying in our oven. This is the result of that. Why do we do it? Because later on in the winter, a lot of those comfort foods, including marinara sauce and other Italian sauces, and just general cooking, is greatly enhanced being able to have basil. All right, so to get started, what I do is I go out in my garden and harvest all sorts of sprigs of beautiful basil. I wish you could be here to smell the scent of this. Next step you're going to do right now is once you have it, you're going to take sprigs. And the fast way to do it for me is I just use my fingernail and my thumb, and I pinch out the leaves right at the base. The reason is you don't want that ending up in your ending dehydration rack where you have to sort it out. So why not just cut it out right now? And so what we do is go ahead and very quickly pinch this, and you can do a lot really quickly. So the next thing we're going to do is take these trays, and as you can see, my oven's about 195 degrees. You can do it as low as 170. These are pretty wet, so I wanted to wick off the moisture pretty quickly. So let's go ahead and place this into the oven. What we're going to do is just put them on the top rack, and sometimes these don't actually fit very well, so I let them overlap. It's no big deal. That'll be just fine. We're going to put that in there, and then this is one of those sensory type of things where you smell and you check in every once a while until it's dry, and we'll come back to that in a moment. Okay, so it's been about an hour and 45 minutes. As I said, it's about 195. You can roast as low as 170, but it's been an hour and 45 minutes. Let's see what we've got. Ah, look at that. Isn't that beautiful? So as you can see, it's changed color, and you can hear it. It's ready to go there, and you can look through this just to see if there's any leaves that are still wet. This looks like it's done a good job, and listen to that. It's ready to crunch down like that. There's a couple ways you can process the basil once it's dry. One of the ways that we do is we simply take it out of the trays, put it in a large stainless steel bowl, use hands that have been washed recently, and just simply crush it, and as you can see, it crushes and condenses very quickly. Now, you can sort through it a little bit. I spend a bit of time to really mill that down, and we're not going to take time on camera to do it. As you can see, it reduces down pretty quickly and pretty effectively. That's one way. Another method is one that dirt farmer Maggie likes to use. She kills two birds with one stone. She keeps the mess contained because if it's a little breezy in here, and this is very light, it tends to fall off the counter a little bit, your processing area. So she contains it right here. The second thing is by crushing it right inside the bag, you can really mill this down quickly. So when it's all done, you also have a dispenser that's ready to roll. So you can simply just pour it right in using a funnel top, and we have a little bit of a high-class problem here. We've filled up one jar. Fortunately, we've got another one on standby. We've got some great fresh eating ahead of us. During the winter months, when we do marinara sauce and other sauces, as I mentioned earlier, well, this is extremely aromatic, makes it really handy, brings back the flavors of summer and the dead of winter. I know you'll enjoy it. An important thing to keep in mind when you're using dried herbs is they are much more potent than fresh ones. Here's why. When you dehydrate them, you remove the water content, leaving the essential oils and the flavoring in a much more intense state. A good rule of thumb is three to one. That is, fresh herbs are about one-third the potency of dried herbs. So if you have a recipe that calls for, let's say, a tablespoon of ingredients, use only a teaspoon, three teaspoons to a tablespoon. So you're using one-third of the dried ingredient to the fresh ingredient. Hey, if you like this video, go ahead and like it and tell your friends about us. Thank you for watching today's video. Again, this is Dirk Farmer Jay.