I was looking around at some formulations for homemade stock powder (or bouillon powder if you want to sound fancy) so we could make our own to replace bought-in stock cubes. Most of them had several powdered herbs in them, herbs which we were growing in the garden at the time. I figure at least some home produced ingredients were a good idea in any stuff we were making for ourselves and I should dry and powder our own organic stuff rather than buy commercially prepared herbs. That is why I started producing our own dried herbs.
At the moment it is winter here. If the weather were warmer I would be using our solar drier and I am too impatient to just cut the herbs and hang them in a warm place to dry naturally, so I wanted to speed things up a bit. If you use your oven for cooking then you can use the residual heat after the food comes out to dry herbs. We have a Nectre bakers oven and I decided to use it to dry herbs, we have the fire going and it is heating the oven anyway, so why not?
We have some baking trays which have perforations to ensure that the heat circulates evenly and to help the bottom of the items being baked dry out and not go soggy, so I grabbed one of them. I placed a layer of rosemary cuttings on the tray, placed in the oven and left the door open so that the herb wouldn’t overheat, driving off the essential oils as well as the water and thereby reducing the flavour of the dried herb. The heat seemed pretty gentle and there was no “rosemary” smell in the room so it did the job pretty well.
I checked how things were going every hour or so and then left the rosemary in overnight, because we let the fire die down anyway once we are heading for bed. The next morning the rosemary was nice and crisp but still with its characteristic odour so the process worked.
With the rosemary dry I stripped the leaves off into a bowl and then put small amounts of leaves (say half a handful) into our mortar and pestle. I would grind the leaves for a while then pour them out of the mortar into a fine colander, which allowed the finer particle size stuff to fall through into a funnel and from there into a glass jar. Any leaves not fine enough to make it through the colander were replaced back into the mortar for more grinding. After 10 minutes or so of this all of the leaves had been processed and I had a third of a jar of fragrant rosemary powder.
My next trick will be to use my home dried herbs to make the aforementioned stock powder. More on that later.
