Drying Herbs

This weekend we wanted to dry some herbs, specifically cilantro.  It comes up volunteer in the garden most years from previous year's crops.  We let some of the cilantro go to seed.  Where the seeds fall, the next year you'll have cilantro sprouting up.  The interesting thing is that the seeds of the cilantro plant are coriander.  Those small ball-looking seeds are used as a spice to cook with.  The plant itself is used to cook with pinto beans, in Mexican rice, in soups, on tacos, and my personal favorite - in scrambled eggs.

There's one problem with cilantro.  At the first sign of warm days, it bolts.  It will go to seed faster than Usain Bolt to the finish line.  In South Louisiana, it is a very short window to grow it.  Sometimes, before it bolts, we harvest it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use throughout the year.  Other times, like today, we'll harvest it and dry it in a food dehydrator on the herb setting.  First, we picked a bunch and washed it up real good.

We snip off all of the leaves for drying.  Usually for cooking, we don't do this.  There is lots of flavor in the stems as well.  For drying, we do cut most of the stems off.

We line the cilantro leaves on the trays of the dehydrator and turn it on.  When you cut up the stems and leaves, the unmistakable scent of cilantro fills the kitchen.  Drying them, however, doesn't really release the scent like I would have thought.  I began to read about this and learned that fresh cilantro is ALWAYS better than dried, because the rich, pungent flavor dissipates when heated or cooked.  Dried cilantro will do in a pinch, but fresh is always better.  I guess I knew this, but we'll dry some anyway for those times when fresh cilantro is not available in the garden.

In no time at all in a dehydrator, the cilantro is dried.  When we are sure the leaves are fully dried, we'll put them in a labeled ziploc bag and hang them for future use in cooking.  I'm interested in trying them out to see if dried cilantro retains some of the flavor that fresh-picked cilantro does.

In addition to mechanically drying in the food dehydrator, I notice that Tricia has a bundle of cilantro hanging to dry naturally on the back patio.  It won't be as fast as the dehydrator, but an experiment to see if we can get the same results with the sun.