Following on from the apparent triumph and success of my ‘sun’ dried tomato effort last week, I decided that I would have a little experiment with the dehydrator and see what other magic could be made in the kitchen with a little hot air piff paff poof.

I’m a great one for fresh herbs, I have a herb garden just outside my kitchen and I grow mint, parsley, thyme, chives, sage & rosemary. I have coriander and basil indoors. And I use one or other of these cheeky little flavour enhancers on a daily basis in everything I cook. At the moment, they are in abundance (not quite the abundance of the courgettes thank goodness) and so fresh and flavourful, I wondered if I could capture it somehow for the winter. But there’s nothing much on tinterweb about herbs in a dehydrator so it was a little game of trial and error. Mostly, I won.

Here is my journey!

I decided to try all of the herbs in turn, my idea is to have them all in little pots to replace the ones from Mr Ocado for my own, and then make a one size fits all ‘dried mixed herbs’ blend of them all – because sometimes (and I’m thinking pasta sauces when I say this) a little bit of everything really does work. Well I say all, I fibbed a bit there as I am not bothering with the rosemary on account of it being so hardy it’s available from the garden all year round, come hell or high water.

I’ve already listed the herbs I have, so I picked handfuls of each, washed them well, and patted dry with kitchen paper. They all had a shelf each in the dehydrator, and I put them in at 70 degrees and had the machine whirring in the background of a busy kitchen afternoon.

  

The sage was the first to dry, which really surprised me. It only took around two hours. I tried numerous methods of crushing and getting it into a little pot but the best one was to crush by hand in the fingers into a bowl and then use a teaspoon to spoon into the little jar. They kept blocking up my mini funnel so that was a bit of a fail.

Next was the basil, at around 3 hours, I used the same method for this to crush and jar. It went down to almost nothing.
The parsley and mint came in at around the same time. Same methods employed as above.

The chives were around 4 hours and for these, I lined them up and snipped into a bowl then used the teaspoon into the jar method.

The thyme I felt was a bit woody and ended up a bit like a birds nest of twigs and wotnot so I’d probably avoid that one next time and stick to the others noted.

So that was it, literally nothing to it. No sorcery whatsoever. What is magic though is the way that the flavours are so strong and intense, and the colours so vivid.

I’ve already tried the chives in a potato salad (super good) and the rest in a spaghetti bolognese.

I’ve bought some gorgeous little jars so everyone will be getting a dried mixed herbs pot in the Christmas hampers this year.

Right, I’m off to have a go at drying bananas. Follow our blog to see how that turns out! 

Yum-tiddly-umptious. x