How To Drying Herbs At Home

After read this post and try several ways to drying herbs at your own home, you will never buy drying one again, because it’s easier than you think this whole time.

There’s many type on how to preserve the food to preventing decay like freezing or canning the food, or even processing it to become another raw food like curing meat, making cheese and yogurt from milk. Perhaps dehydrating is still the easier way to preserve the herbs because most of the herbs already contain less moisture than another vegetable so you can dry it fast.

Drying Herbs
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Basics Steps Drying Herbs.

The main profit from drying herbs are they became safe from bacteria, mold or yeast and will kept the potent of a herbs for at least 12 month ahead. Air circulation and some warmth are the main key to drying it, below are the most used way to dry it.

For some people washing herbs before process are important steps, especially if you bought the herbs from market and not grown it yourself.

1.       Drying Herbs Indoor.

Tie a bundle of herbs and put them upside down inside paper bag with some hole around, used tie twist so you can easily tighten the herbs because those herbs will shrink when they dry, and do not forget to tie the paper bag, now just look for some warm and dry spot over your house to start drying herbs, the process can take hours or even daily depend on how much moisture inside the herbs.

2.       Drying Herbs with Sunlight.

IT easy if you live in a warm and dry place where the sun are available most of the day, you can used the heat of the sun to dry the herb, but remember to not exposed them directly at sunlight to preventing the herbs get bleaching. You can make a drying screen from a window like media and put some net around it. Or you can build your own solar dehydrator.

3.       Dehydrating Herbs with a Machine. 

If you have a dehydrator machine and it really save your time and money are worth to used it, you can buy or build it yourself, several type of the machine have temperature control and a fan inside it so you can adjust the temperature and timers to match the herbs requirement to dry.

4.       Oven Drying Herbs.

It sound easy because most of us are already used it on daily activity, but actually it is not the efficient way because as you already know that most oven working temperature are more than 100 degrees but herbs are need to be dried at 100 degree Celsius maximum, also herbs drying process require air circulation and most oven do not have vent. If you insist on using oven to do it you need thermometer and a lot of experiment to match the requirement of the herb.

5.       Refrigerator Drying Herbs.

You can used refrigerator to drying your herbs stock, just put them in the fridge for a few days, this tips was discovered by Madalene Hill and Gwen Barclay (daughter) by accident. The herb will dry in beautifully crisp and also not changing the color, flavor and fragrance.

That’s all 5 Way to Drying Herbs at home, you can choose a few way that suit you the most.