How To Dry Basil

Hi. My name's John from Growing Life, London, UK, urban and indoor gardening specialists, and we're here today to talk about how to dry the herb basil. Basil's a fantastic culinary herb, very popular in Italian and southeast Asian cuisine.

And when we dry basil, what we're doing is, it's a process whereby we want to remove the water from the harvested basil to a point that stops spoilage microorganisms and bacteria from forming. In simple terms, it's to stop it going off. When we've dried basil, it will retain its freshness, nearly all the freshness and goodness of fresh basil, with all of the oils, the essential oils of the plant still intact.

Now, once we've harvested basil, what we need to do is to prepare it, ready for drying, and the first thing is to simply wash it to remove any soil or insects which may have, which may be on the harvested basil leaves. Having washed it very gently, we simply remove the excess water between sheets of paper towel and then transfer it, the leaves, to our drying appliance which could be a drying station like this or can be hung in sprigs simply in a vented space. So, drying time will generally take from about 12 hours even up to a week or two, if it's in a vented space.

Once the basil's dried, it then needs to be transferred to a storage jar. The test for knowing when your basil is dry is that it should crack and crumble between your fingers. And it's only once it gets to this point will you want to remove it from the drying appliance, allowing it to cool before transferring it to your chosen storage container.

My name's John, from Growing Life, London, and that was an introduction on how to dry basil. .