How To Store Basil

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

It's very easy to grow, both outdoors and indoors throughout the year, and when we've grown a good basil crop, obviously we can't use it all at once. So, we look to store some of the basil to enjoy it over the coming months. Now, basil has to be stored, or is best stored, dried or frozen, but drying tends to maintain the oils and the flavor better.

And when we store dried basil, the first thing we need to do is to make sure that the basil is properly dried. So, what do we need to actually store basil? Well, in simple terms, the most important thing is an airtight container. Here we have a couple of examples.

This is primarily preserving jars from Italy, and here we have heat seal pouches, which are simply cut to size and sealed closed by the use of an iron. Now, when we're handling dried basil, fresh herbs are very fragile but dried herbs are incredibly so. As you know, it'll crack and crumble between the fingers, and this way, which we want to make sure it is when it goes into the preserving jars, before the lids are sealed, and then it's stored for use at later date.

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