In the pantry of a good housewife, for winter a lot of everything useful and tasty is stored. Flavored herbs can also be harvested in various ways to add these summer delicacies to various dishes in the winter. Let's find out how best to store basil for the winter, so that it does not lose its properties.
How to store basil in a refrigerator in oil?
The unique taste of basil and oil from it can be made with your own hands. It is added to various vegetable salads, sauces are served to meat dishes. This seasoning is stored for 3-4 months under a tight lid. To make the oil fill you need sunflower, but better olive oil, a little salt and freshly fresh basil leaves.
Raw material is collected together with twigs and leaves, washed, dried and finely ground either with a knife or with a blender. Then the resulting mixture is salted and poured with oil, so that it covers the surface of the greens. The mixture is stirred, covered with a lid and sent to storage in a cold place.
To extend the shelf life of such an oil mixture from basil, it is placed in an ice cube and frozen cubes in the freezer. Then they are removed, poured into a bag and added during cooking.
How to store dried basil?
Before storing a dry basil, it should naturally be dried, and various methods are used for this. Each of them has its advantages, regarding the speed of drying and the amount of remaining nutrients.
The easiest and fastest method is to collect basil together with twigs. Thoroughly rinse it, shake off the water, tie it in small bundles and hang it somewhere in the shade into drafts or in a room that is well ventilated.
A more labor-consuming method is to pre-treat in the form of washing and drying, then cut off all the leaves, cut them finely on a dosage and put them again in a dark drying room. From time to time, the basil must be turned over to uniformly dry and avoid caking.
The third method is the fastest, but it casts doubt on the availability of useful substances in the product, since, as is known, some of them are irretrievably lost during heat treatment. So, the leaves are cut off, washed, dried, and then placed on parchment and placed in the oven. It is necessary to set the temperature no more than 40 ° C and leave to dry the dressing for an hour, turning the layers from time to time.
Store the spices in dried form best in a sealed container - a ceramic or glass jar with a tightly ground lid. Some experts recommend pouring dry herbs into a linen bag. But in this case, the fragrance quickly disappears, and inside it can start a moth.