Dry your homegrown basil with this handy step-by-step guide on how to dry, and freeze basil. Great for use in colder months when fresh basil may not be available.
We have a lot of basil in our backyard and since fall is on its way we thought it would be a good idea to store the basil. This way we can use our homegrown basil in winter too! We made this guide very visual by using lot's of pictures, also there is a bonus at the end!
Pre-heat your oven at the lowest setting possible, in our case that was 50 degrees celsius.
Add baking paper to the baking plate of your oven.
Grab a salad spinner
Above picture is our basil plant with a lot leaves ready for processing. We have already used so much of it and it's still huge, growing bigger every single day.
Fill your sink with cold water
Fill your sink with cold water.
Cut the basil leaves from the stems and rinse them. Don't include the dried up or brown leaves.
Add leaves to the baking plate
Lay out the basil leaves nice and evenly. Make sure the leaves don't overlap as much as those areas will not dry as quickly.
Drying basil leaves in an oven
Put into the oven for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. Depending on what kind of oven you have it can take longer or less. Since the temperature is low, you can feel if the leaves are dry enough. Above photo shows the drying in progress.
Dried basil leaves from an oven
Ta-dah! The basil leaves are dried and ready for crumbling.
Just roll the dried basil leaves between your fingers to crumble.
The end result is shown above.
We've used this Kitchenaid Artisan blender to blend the rinsed and cleaned basil leaves.
Add basil leaves to your blender.
Blend it using the pulse setting on your blender until it looks similar to the picture above.
Add in olive oil to make it freeze easier and easier to cut when you might need it.
Chopped basil leaves with olive oil
The end result will be similar to what is shown in the above picture.
Olive oil and basil leaves in a ziplock bag
Put the basil and olive oil into a container, or as we did: a ziplock bag. Be sure to label it because it can look the same as spinach!
View the original blog via:
https://ohmydish.com/blog/dry-basil
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