Adventures in preserving: Basil
Someone asked earlier if I would talk about preserving food. At this time of year, if you have extra preserving it somehow is a good thing to do.
For those of you who’ve never thought about such things before, there are many ways to preserve food:
- drying (dried apples, raisins (dried grapes) , beef jerky)
- canning (jams, jellies, soup)
- lacto-fermentation (sauerkraut)
- pickling (pickled cucumbers, pickled beets)
- salting (meat, herbs)
- freezing (vegetables, meat)
Making cheese is a way to preserve extra milk, and making wine is a way to preserve extra juice. All sorts of foods are preserved, and it’s not too difficult to learn to do. It does take some practice, though.
I thought I might try different methods of preserving different foods and report back what happened. If you want to do this with other foods and let us know what happened, that would be great too!
This year my two basil plants went overtime, and I gave fresh basil to my neighbors, ate it in salads, put it on my hamburger, and chopped it into spaghetti sauce. But I still had a lot left over. So I tried drying it.
Supposedly this works well in dry climates, but in Oklahoma this was a no-go. It looked okay, but that was about it. Bad smelling moldy dry yuck. Compost pile for you. Grade: F
A friend who’s an herbalist suggested layering basil with kosher salt and storing the combination in the fridge. This works okay, but the result doesn’t smell or taste at all like the original. Grade: C+
I read about potting and/or putting the stems in a jar of water to root up. This worked great!
If you notice, this is rooting in the jar! (I have a terrible time growing things inside, so I was very excited.)
Now I have two sets of basil that I can take leaves from as I like. I can even uproot the ones growing outside and bring them in if I like, and overwinter them inside the garage (which has a sunny window.) This is a much better way of keeping basil fresh. Grade: A+
So there you have it!
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] Red State Green wrote a fantastic post today on “Adventures in preserving: Basil”Here’s ONLY a quick extractMaking cheese is a way to preserve extra milk, and making wine is a way to preserve extra juice…. […]
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Great idea on the basil! I’m going to do that. I have some from my garden I’d like in the house. Maybe I can just cut some and put it in a jar of water. By the way, I just love your blog slogan “Conservation is Conservative”. Just great!