Drying Basil

Basil is one of our favorite herbs.  We grow a lot of it.  We make a number of batches of pesto and freeze meal sized servings of it as it is an easy meal to cook some pasta and thaw out some delicious pesto.  Basil produces a copious amount of seeds.  A couple years ago I dried and saved a quart sized mason jar full of basil seeds.  Well, basil just comes up volunteer every year, so I never really use any of the seed.

In addition to making pesto, we dry some in the food dehydrator that we use in cooking during the winter when our basil dies off.  I go out to the garden and pick a good amount of the young leaves off the basil plants.

Fresh basil in the bucket

Mrs. Tricia will pick off the stems and cull any leaves that are substandard.

De-stemming and sorting basil leaves

We've learned that it is very important to wash the leaves pretty good.  Even though you might not be able to see them, it is amazing the number of little critters that will float to the surface of the water when you submerge the leaves in water.  

Soaking basil leaves in water

Once we spin the leaves dry in the salad spinner, we lay the washed leaves in the food dehydrator.  We have two separate trays in the unit, so we space them out to achieve uniform air flow.

In the dehydrator they go

We'll put the cover on it and plug it in.

About to fire it up

Here are what the basil leaves look like after one night in the dehydrator.

After one night

Here they are after the next day.

After two days

When Tricia checked on them today, the basil leaves are completely dry, so we'll turn it off.  It is difficult to say how many hours we left them in the dehydrator because we turned it on and off intermittently for a couple of days.  I would say it took less than 48 hours to complete the job.

They're done!

We bag it up and put it in the pantry for use later when cooking.  Mrs. Tricia, the CEO of the kitchen, says that the dried basil really holds its flavor.

Bagged up to store in the pantry

Two thumbs up for Our Maker's Acres Dried Basil.  Easy & Delicious!