Question about preserving herbs

[gardengoddessr]

I am new to gardening.
I have tons of fresh herbs growing but my question is can I preserve herbs such as basil, sage, etc the same way I would pickle veggies or do all herbs need to be dried to be preserved?
In my garden I have basil, sage, parsley, oregano, mint and lemon balm. Do these all need to be dried out if I want to save them?
Thanks

[Susan W]

Good question! Now, do tell where you are as growing season makes a huge difference. Drying and freezing the most common ways for herbs, and each different.

[rainbowgardener]

I have a simple still for distilling essential oils from my herbs:

https://www.scientificsonline.com/distillation-kit.html

I use the essential oils to fragrance home-made soaps, lotions, candles. Gets rid of a lot of herbs that way - a couple cups of fresh herbs become a couple 1 oz vials of essential oil.

Basil I turn in to pesto and freeze in baggies.

A lot of herbs I make into jelly and can - purple basil jelly is a big favorite, anise hyssop strawberry jam is wonderful, but this year so far I have also done apple sage jelly, pineapple sage- pineapple jelly, lemon balm jelly.

You can also make them into syrups, which is basically the same as jelly but less jelled.

You can use them for infusing vinegars, oils, butter, vodka, cocktails, water, honey.

It isn't infusing exactly but you can put herbs in with salt and sugar to flavor them.

Mint, lemon balm, tarragon sprigs are good in lemonade and other beverages.

I cook things up with them and then can or freeze the result - I have swiss chard lasagna in my freezer and tonight I canned four jars of tomato sauce. Besides using up a bunch of the tomatoes, it uses up herbs too.

But yes, I do dry a lot of herbs. It is easy. Mostly I just bunch them and hang the bunch upside down inside a paper bag in a cool dark place. As soon as they are dry, clean the leaves off the stem and put them in glass jars away from sunlight.

I use my dried herbs to make herbal tea blends.

I don't do much freezing of herbs other than the pesto, but people do:
https://www.kalynskitchen.com/2006/06/ho ... -herb.html

I don't think it counts as herbs, but I do have garlic cloves and chopped onions in my freezer right now.

[rainbowgardener]

Here's a thread I did last month on uses for the lemon balm:

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... 29&t=53817

Be careful with it. It is in the mint family and spreads rapidly both by runners and by seed. It's becoming a weed on my property.

Chopped mint leaves, fresh or dried, are nice in your vacuum cleaner bag. Keeps the bag fresh and helps keep the carpet fresh.

I guess ways to use it is a little strayed from the topic of how to preserve it for later use. But I think of all those infusions etc as a kind of storage. If you flavor your sugar with lavender, then later you can bake with the lavender sugar for a bit of lavender flavor in your cookies or whatever. It won't be real strong that way, especially if a long time elapses in between, but the infused oils and vinegars do retain the herb flavor well.

[imafan26]

It does not say where you are from, but the perennial herbs would be available all of the time, and they are much better fresh than preserved. The only exceptions are dill and bay leaves whose flavors are much more intense when dried.

The annual herbs and some perennial ones can be made into flavored oils and vinegars besides being dried and frozen. Flavored oils and vinegars do have a limited shelf life especially if you keep and herb sprig in the bottle for decorative purposes. But the way I prefer to preserve herbs is in an herbal butter. It is easy to do and the oil in the butter preserves the color and flavor in the freezer.

https://www.ces.ncsu.edu/hil/hil-8111.html
https://www.organicgardening.com/cook/4- ... s?page=0,0
https://tipnut.com/preserve-herbs/

[applestar]

Sometimes, I can be pretty lazy. This isn't good for long term storage, but for small quantities and when you are feeling overwhelmed by any thought/sort of "processing" project, simply remove any blemished parts that you won't want to eat later, rinse, cut stems to fit if necessary and put in a zip bag and freeze.

Once frozen, the brittle leaves will crumble off the stems and you can pick out the stems as necessary. Open the bag, take out the amount of loose crumbled leaves you want to use to garnish soup, salad, add to sauces, add special zing to sandwiches and omelettes, etc., and put the rest back in the freezer.

This doesn't work too well for teas or --obviously-- garnishes requiring fresh herbs, but so far, seems to work for anything else. Right now, I have basil, oregano and what's left of spring cilantro in the freezer.

After too long of a while, too much frost builds up in the bag -- at that point, I just dump the whole thing in some kind of soup or sauce.

[rainbowgardener]

Right now my whole house smells like lavender (wonderful! ), because I'm oven drying some. When I'm in a hurry, I just spread it on a tray in the oven. Put the oven on the lowest setting and leave it just about ten minutes. Then turn the oven off, without opening the door and leave it in there. Check it a few hrs later. If it isn't dry enough, give it another ten minutes of oven on warm and then turn off again. You don't want to bake your herbs, but this is a quick way to dry them....

So you've gotten lots of answers; any of this helpful, gardeng?

[imafan26]

I haven't had much luck preserving cilantro. If I freeze it, it is mushy when it thaws, and since I use it as a garnish at the end it isn't very appealing once it has been frozen. Dried cilantro doesn't have a whole lot of flavor. Can it be pureed and used like recaito?

[rainbowgardener]

I have ten baggies of pesto in my freezer so far. Each one is a meal. There will be plenty more basil to come, I just have to decide when to stop with the pesto. I still have the last bag of last year's in the freezer, I made more than we ended up using.

[rainbowgardener]

So I broke the jar that came with my little still , shown above, and generally needed some replacement parts. I can get a new one just like it for $30. But it takes hours on my electric stove and the product is actually hydrasol, a mix of the essential oil and water, not true essential oil. So I was looking around at what my choices would be.

I found this:

https://oilextech.com/shop/essenex-100h/

It is a true steam distillation process (not boiling the herbs), done in 6 minutes in the microwave. AND it separates out the hydrasol from the essential oil, so that I would be producing true essential oils as well as the hydrosol. But 6 minutes in the micro is SOOOO much less energy usage than hours on the stove. I always feel bad about how much energy my projects use.

Costs $155, but it's a one time thing. I have had my little still for enough years to know that I will get a lot of use out of it. If I started selling the essential oils, I could make the money back quickly - lavender essential oil sells for upwards of $20 an ounce. I never could sell what I made before because it wasn't true essential oil.

So .... holding my breath .... I think I am going to go for it!

[gardengoddessr]

Thanks everyone for your awesome replies. I live in NJ. I froze some herbs which obviously was the easiest way. I tried to dry my lemon balm but I had so much of it and was kind of in a rush so I didn't realize it was only partially dried and now it is rotting in a mason jar that I have not yet cleaned out!
Basically I was just wondering if you can pickle herbs like in a vinegar-water-sugar-salt mix. It seems like you can but to me basil and stuff tastes better fresh.

Thanks again!

[rainbowgardener]

It seems like the herbs are part of the flavoring for pickling something else... pickled cucumbers, pickled beets, pickled peppers or whatever. Pickled herbs by themselves would have no relation to the fresh ones, since the vinegar and other stuff in the pickling brine are so much stronger flavored. I wouldn't really see the point of it. You would have nothing but prickling brine waiting for something to put in it.

That said I have been using herbs to infuse vinegars and oils (where the point is flavoring the vinegar or oil, not preserving the herb) as imafan noted. White wine vinegar infused with purple basil comes out the most beautiful deep pink/red.

[ElizabethB]

As always Rainbow has excellent suggestions. I am fairly lazy and stick to drying for preservation. I am also blessed with an extremely long growing season. My Rosemary is evergreen. My sage, Thyme and Oregano are tender perennials. Parsley, Cilantro, Basil and Dill I dry. The Parsley and Cilantro I replant each year. My Parsley will sometimes survive the winter. I allow some of my Dill and Basil to go to seed. I harvest some of the seed and scatter the rest in the bed. I have plants at different stages of growth in my herb garden. I do collect and dry Basil, Dill, Sage, Thyme and Oregano just in case.

I make a seasoned olive oil using lots of my fresh herbs and peppers. It is time consuming so I usually make a several gallons at a time. This makes a great Christmas gift. I find inexpensive but pretty containers at World Market.

The recipe calls for dried herbs. If you are using fresh double the amount.

1 quart Extra Virgin First Cold Pressed Olive Oil
1/4 cup dried Oregano
1/4 cup dried Basil
1 tbsp. Anise Seed
1 tbsp. Garlic Powder
1 tbsp. dried Thyme
1 tbsp. Onion Powder
3 Bay leaves
2 fresh Jalapeno Peppers cut in half length wise, cored and seeded
2 fresh Banana Peppers cut in half length wise, cored and seeded
2 fresh Cayenne Peppers cut in half length wise, cored and seeded
1 Jigger Rice Wine Vinegar

Store in a large glass jar that has been boiled in a cool dark place for 4 to 6 weeks. Strain through cheese cloth and transfer to gift jars or containers.

Reserve the herb and pepper mixture to make a second batch.

I use glass containers with either a cork stopper or one of those jars with a sealed ring and a wire flip top. Whatever you put it in must be boiled first to sanitize. If you use a cork stopper seal it with wax. The oil is delicate so do not scald your container after filling.

Looks like I have my weekend project cut out for me if I want to give my family this wonderful oil for Christmas. They BEG for it.

[rainbowgardener]

Yup... see also: https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... 10&t=54978

I made infused white wine vinegar and infused olive oils. The white wine vinegar was just done with purple basil-- makes a beautiful color. The olive oil I infused with sage or sage and thyme or made it in to salmoriglio -- that's olive oil infused with parsley, oregano, and rosemary, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper. It is a nice golden yellow color and smells wonderful.

That's not exactly a way of preserving the herbs, but it is a way of using them. Mostly I also dry herbs for preservation and jar them up in spice jars. The excess of those go in the Christmas baskets too.

[shelleyinmichigan]

I'm thinking about ordering the small distiller you linked to previously, for personal use of my homegrown herbs, but it's hard for me to tell how big it is from the picture. Can you give me a rough sizing of the unit.....and even though the website states it will produce EO, what is the difference between that EO and the true EO from the microwave unit? Did your original distiller not seperate the oil from the hydrosol? Any info would be appreciated. Thinking about trying this.......but it produces nothing but hydrosol.....and I'm not inclined to make a reflux distiller.

https://blog.cherylsdelights.com/2012/05 ... distiller/

So I broke the jar that came with my little still , shown above, and generally needed some replacement parts. I can get a new one just like it for $30. But it takes hours on my electric stove and the product is actually hydrasol, a mix of the essential oil and water, not true essential oil. So I was looking around at what my choices would be.

I found this:

https://oilextech.com/shop/essenex-100h/

It is a true steam distillation process (not boiling the herbs), done in 6 minutes in the microwave. AND it separates out the hydrasol from the essential oil, so that I would be producing true essential oils as well as the hydrosol. But 6 minutes in the micro is SOOOO much less energy usage than hours on the stove. I always feel bad about how much energy my projects use.

Costs $155, but it's a one time thing. I have had my little still for enough years to know that I will get a lot of use out of it. If I started selling the essential oils, I could make the money back quickly - lavender essential oil sells for upwards of $20 an ounce. I never could sell what I made before because it wasn't true essential oil.

So .... holding my breath .... I think I am going to go for it!

[shelleyinmichigan]

Ugh.....I needed to read farther.....the small distiller DOES NOT seperate the oils regardless of what their website said....sorry about that.

So I broke the jar that came with my little still , shown above, and generally needed some replacement parts. I can get a new one just like it for $30. But it takes hours on my electric stove and the product is actually hydrasol, a mix of the essential oil and water, not true essential oil. So I was looking around at what my choices would be.

I found this:

https://oilextech.com/shop/essenex-100h/

It is a true steam distillation process (not boiling the herbs), done in 6 minutes in the microwave. AND it separates out the hydrasol from the essential oil, so that I would be producing true essential oils as well as the hydrosol. But 6 minutes in the micro is SOOOO much less energy usage than hours on the stove. I always feel bad about how much energy my projects use.

Costs $155, but it's a one time thing. I have had my little still for enough years to know that I will get a lot of use out of it. If I started selling the essential oils, I could make the money back quickly - lavender essential oil sells for upwards of $20 an ounce. I never could sell what I made before because it wasn't true essential oil.

So .... holding my breath .... I think I am going to go for it!

[ElizabethB]

Since the growing season is in full swing I decided to revive this thread

In addition to drying- do mostly, freezing - which I am not fond of - pesto - love it, infused oils and vinegar - love it - I have another couple of favorite ways to make use of herbs.

I grow LOTS of sweet Basil and have Basil Mayonnaise in the refrigerator all summer.

1 cup mayonnaise - home made or if commercial use Hellmann's - there really is a difference in taste
2 tbsps. premium olive oil
2 cloves garlic - smashed and peeled
Zest of 1 small lemon
2 tbsps. fresh lemon juice
1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper
1 cup loosely packed fresh basil

Put all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until basil is finely chopped and all ingredients are incorporated. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

If you make your own mayonnaise it is good in the refrigerator for 3 or 4 days. If you use Hellmann's it will keep for 2 or 3 weeks.

That is NEVER a problem. Use as a dip for veggies or chips, on a sandwich instead of plain mayonnaise, as a salad dressing. On top of broiled fish or grilled steak.

Another favorite is herbed butter.

Use either salted or unsalted butter at room temperature. 1 stick.

Add - oh - Maybe 1/8th cup finely minced herb of your choice. Work the herbs into the butter. I either use a wooden spoon or my very clean hands. Use a spatula and transfer the butter into small molds.

I found some rubber (?) candy molds at Hobby Lobby that are perfect. Freeze the butter in the molds. Pop the butter out and store in a zip lock in the freezer until ready to use. Do label your zip lock. The first time I did this I figured I would be able to identify the herb in the butter by appearance - WRONG ANSWER

I make herbed butter with dill, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, sage, parsley and cilantro. This year I made a batch with fennel - I reduced the amount of herb to 1 tbsp. to a 1/4 lb of butter.

The herbed butter is wonderful for cooking and a must have on the holiday dinner table. When we go out to dinner we are frequently presented with a plate of assorted, flavored butter. HMMMM Mine are better.

Enjoy your herbs

[imafan26]

Mostly I use herbs fresh. I have done flavored oils and vinegars but they don't keep very long and I don't use them up fast enough. The only other thing I do with them which takes very little skill or time is to make herb butters. I can add minced garlic to any herb butter.

Herbs I have done

Rosemary, garlic butter
dill, garlic butter
parsley, salt and garlic butter
Parmesan cheese, basil, parsley and garlic butter
Thai curry paste cillantro roots, ginger (or galangal), chili peppers, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass.

[applestar]

So both elizbethB and imafan make herb butters. Sounds easy enough and do-able.
I think I try with oregano and garlic chives.

Imafan, ElizabethB said she uses about 2 Tbs finely chopped fresh herbs per stick of butter. Is that about how much you use, imafan? ElizabethB, you used half the amount of fennel because it's too strong?

I was thinking I have silicone Madeleine pan -- I might be able to use that to mold the butter.

I was wondering if you could mix EVOO to the butter/herb mix and still have it solidify. What would be the right proportion, I wonder?

What are typical use for the different herb butters? I can see fish and baked potatoes, maybe cooked vegs....

[applestar]

Shelley, glad you revived this thread. Are you still trying to decide about the distiller?

rainbowgardener, did you get that microwave gizmo? How is that working for you? I don't have a microwave oven -- I hate those things -- so I'll have to go with the stovetop one if I ever get one. (And your posts always makes me want to get one )

[rainbowgardener]

I did and unfortunately I was very disappointed in it. Good news, it does produce some herbal essence after only 6 min in microwave, which is WAY less energy use than the stove top model. Bad news, the product is also a hydrosol, not a true essential oil. Despite the company's claims, I never could get any actual pure oil from it. And even if it worked exactly as proclaimed, you would be getting a few drops of essential oil from cups of materials, plus some hydrosol. Worse news, the hydrosol resulting is much more dilute than what my stove top model produced, much less fragrant. Bottom line is you just don't get as much of the essence out of the herb microwaving it for a few minutes with very little water as you do boiling it for a long time.

So now I am very conflicted. I can get a low quality product with very little energy use or a much higher quality product with much more energy use.... sigh.


PS, I will say the microwave model works better the more oil is in the material you start with. What worked best for me was juniper berries and citrus peel, which have quite a bit of oil in them.

[Susan W]

I keep thinking I'll mess with herb butters, perhaps the time has come! I have plenty of herbs growing in the back and side yard. Sometimes forget, or just don't do things as cooking for one not a great inspiration for dressing things up!

Another herb use, not culinary is making an air-fresh. Again, I have not done this, but sounds simple and a quick google will get you hints. This is putting mint in cheap vodka, let it set in a jar, then put in a spritz bottle. One of my market customers was getting mint for this. I haven't seen her this season, perhaps moved from neighborhood.

[ElizabethB]

How much you use in herbed butter is really up to you. It just depends on how strong an herbed flavor you like. Start with less - taste - add more if you want a more intense flavor. Yes on using less of the fennel -it is strong. Basil and dill are my favorites and I like an intense flavor so I may use a little more. Rosemary maybe a little less. I usually just use one herb but I like the idea of incorporating garlic. A couple of weeks ago we had a tomato butter. I am thinking maybe some sun dried tomatoes and basil +/- garlic.

I have never had a problem with the infused oils going bad. Of course it does not sit in the pantry very long. My DIL said that hers went rancid. When I asked her where she stored it she said "On the window sill" No wonder it did not last.

If you have a lot of basil do try the basil mayonnaise - a party in your mouth.

I remember my grandmother making sachet from dried lavender and rose petals. She made little packets from scraps of fabric and stuffed them with the lavender and rose petals. She used the sachet in her lingerie drawer and in the chest where she stored bed linens. When I visited she would tuck one under my pillow. I can still smell it.

Dried but preferably fresh - I love to cook with herbs. I am always playing around with different herbs - either alone or combinations - in different dishes. Some of my favorites are rosemary with lamb or venison. Dill - lots - with fish - especially with salmon. Dill with carrots. I love a Beurre Blanc sauce with dill or basil on pan grilled asparagus. A Hollandaise sauce with either dill or basil over poached eggs or on fish. Fresh oregano, thyme and basil in a fresh from the garden tomato sauce. When you get in the habit of cooking with your herbs you don't have to worry about having a lot of excess that needs keeping. The end of the season is when I harvest and dry for winter use.

[ElizabethB]

Plant extra dill an let some flower. the back swallow tail butterfly will lay her eggs on the plant. The caterpillars devour the plant before moving off to make their chrysalis. The plant recovers and puts out tons of new stems and foliage. Skipper butterflies are attracted to mint.

[shelleyinmichigan]

Yes, still thinking about it......

What I initially wanted it for was to get the oils out of all the catnip I have and turn it into insect repellant for personal use, but the more I look for a distiller the more I find I can do with other goodies I grow as well.

I make a jewelweed salve by slowly cooking the stems and leaves in a small amount of olive oil. I don't remember where I got that technique but even through my years of soap making I know some about combining molecules. The oils, not being water soluble, need another oil molecule to bind with. In the end the jewelweed did prove to be very effective on my poison ivy blisters.

Which makes me wonder if I could extract the oil in the same manner. Only drawback is I have two indoor cats with a STRONG propensity for catnip. Can you say prison riot?



rainbowgardener, did you get that microwave gizmo? How is that working for you? I don't have a microwave oven -- I hate those things -- so I'll have to go with the stovetop one if I ever get one. (And your posts always makes me want to get one )[/quote]

[rainbowgardener]

see my post from earlier today, above, re my experience with the microwave distiller.