What’s wrong with drying basil by just letting it hang from a hook or something for a day or two until its dry?
All the websites say you need to put it between towels or put it in a very shallow plate of water and let that dry out or something. Porque?
-FrL-
Basil is very moist, more like spinach or lettuce than a lot of herbs and if you leave it hanging it’s more likely to get moldy and stinky than dry. Putting it into paper towels draws the excess moisture off quickly. I’ve found the flower stalks will dry by hanging but haven’t had much luck drying the leaves that way. My favorite way to preserve basil is to make pesto and freeze it, though. Dried basil doesn’t have a lot of the flavor I want.
Drying basil is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Freeze it please.
There’s nothing wrong with the hang and dry method.When I pull up the plants at the end of season, they dry on the garden fence for a day or so if rain isn’t imminent.But don’t bunch them together.
Typically September,zone 6.
Yes. What he said. You might as well be crumbling green tissue paper into your food.
The ground rules on basil:
Use fresh when possible.
If someone is holding a gun to the heads of your family, then it’s acceptable to use frozen.
If all you have is dry, and someone is holding a gun to the heads of your family, make sure he’s serious by letting him shoot one, or three at the most, before resorting to the dry.
Can you just stick it in the freezer as is, or is there any prep to do first?
Also, why do people get so passionate about this? Does it do more than simply weaken the flavor? Does it change it in some way?
-FrL-
Drying absolutely destroys the flavor when you compare it to fresh. Same with cilantro, except don’t even let dried in your house. It’s an even worse degradation in flavor than basil.
Chop the basil (or cilantro) finely, and freeze it in ice cube trays with water covering the herbs. Pop the cubes out when frozen, store in a ziploc bag in the freezer.
FYI, **Cervaise **is actually quoting here from the fine print of a McCormick jar of dried basil.
This is also very true; dried cilantro actually sucks flavor out of dish. Dried basil, while it doesn’t actually subtract flavor, adds a certain dustiness to the flavor, far outweighing any actual basil flavor it contributes. (This paragraph, btw, contains no hyperbole; speakin purely literally here.)
As far as why? I don’t know; I assume most of the flavor chemicals–esters?–that make basil taste like basil are volatile, and evaporate with the water. It’s got to be something like that, because dried basil is to basil what dried water is to water.
(sorry for the multiposts; at work, fragmented)
–as to freezing it in the first place, again what **Cervaise **said. But I have been in the position where I’ve grown huge amounts of basil and can’t keep up with it. This is even though I eat salads made of basil, and serve it as a vegetable like spinach. In such an instance, I have been known, rather than throw it away, to freeze it for later inclusion in cooked dishes.
So has anyone done anything like a study on this? Blind taste tests or something like that? Anybody know if there’s a such thing as a culinary science journal? (I’m sure there is.) I’d like to look this up.
I confess to some skepticism. I just tried a tiny bit of fresh basil, then a few hours later, tried a tiny bit of dried basil. (McCormick’s in fact). I don’t know that there was no difference, but the dried certainly seemed pungeant and sweet and “basily” and had “staying power” (i.e. I was tasting it for quite a while after it was swallowed) much like fresh basil.
The texture of the latter was certainly awful, but this would make no difference in a sauce.
But I’d have to try this again under several different conditions to get a complete idea.
Also–I’ve been under the impression that the main contribution of a lot of spices (including basil) is its smell (which as we all know is an integral part of the flavor, if not the taste properly speaking, of a food)–and the dried maybe had weaker smell maybe, but still, it had the right scent I thought. Even just three flakes on my finger smelled quite clearly like basil, even from a few inches away.
-FrL-
Hey! That’s the same company that gave me a recipe for an allegedly Asian sauce using powdered ginger.
Which of course tastes nothing like ground ginger, even in a jar. Wherein may lie our differences.
Ya know, you people might want to ask the guy if he’s amenable to all these torture techniques (Hang? Freeze? Dry? Is he an alcoholic?) before you start inflicting all this suffering on him.
[GDRLH]
I think it's a bit of a spoof. But there's no doubt that for pesto you need fresh basil , or frozen as a compromise.On that note a couple things that work for me are vacuum bagging fresh picked,or processing fresh with suitable quantities of olive oil and salt to make pesto later by adding the cheese and nuts.That keeps in the 'fridge a few months.
Dried basil is good for lots of things, and convenient to keep 'til next years' crop.Absolutely not a spoof. Dried basil, the main flavor component is dustiness. Fresh basil, the main flavor component is a pungent, licoricey flavor. Two entirely different things. But entirely.
“Dried basil, the main flavor component is dustiness.”
If your reference is grocery store dried ala McCormicks or Durkee etc., I suppose. Try drying your own fresh sometime, it might change your mind .
Seconded freezing. It keeps well & it’s just like fresh.
Janis, who discovered Basil grows like gangbusters
I agree.
I’m guessing that Alton Brown’s box-fan / cellulose air filter trick might be good for drying basil effectively.
IIRC, he got a cheapo box fan, and then layered pleated cellulose air filters and herbs, then got a big rubber band or elastic loop and bound it all together.
Then he ran the fan for something like 6 hours.
That’s how he made jerky too. It makes great jerky, even if the pleated paper furnace filters aren’t quite as cheap as he said on the show. In fact, now I feel like making more - it gives the house that lovely jerky aroma all week!
“How do you like my kitchen hook, Mr. Basil? Now that I have suspended you here, your precious moisture will quickly evaporate away until you are no more delicious than a piece of green paper.”
“I think you’ve made your point, Goldchef, thank you for the demonstration.”
“Choose your next witticism carefully, it may be your last. Soon we will hear the anguished cries of a thousand gourmands mourning your demise.”
“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr. Basil, I expect you to dry.”