How to oven-dry fresh herbs at home—a process so simple yet efficient. In an hour or less you will be bottling up your own dried herbs! For more simple recipes, click here.

Do you have more herbs growing in your garden than you can use at any one time? That’s a situation I recently found myself in; I quickly began researching how I could save them for use. What a shame it would be for all that beautiful flavor to perish!

Preserving Herbs

After much time was spent researching, two ways to preserve fresh herbs stood out to me: blanching and freezing, or oven-drying. Oven-drying herbs is the best way to ensure longevity, and is the most convenient to use while cooking. However, if you haven’t considered blanching herbs before, check out this post, as it is a great (and also quicker) option for preserving your herbs if you are not concerned about losing some shelf life. If I am being honest, I have opted to blanch most of my herbs over the summer due to the ease of it. It also doesn’t hurt that some herbs even retain stronger flavor when blanched and frozen instead of dried. However, this article is about oven-drying herbs, so lets shift back to the topic at hand: how to oven-dry fresh herbs at home.

Check out: How to Blanch Fresh Herbs at Home

What you Need:

• Clean, dry herbs
• Parchment paper
• Baking sheets
• Oven
• Containers or bags for storage

Quick tip here, some herbs dry at different speeds so it is best to keep them separate.

Getting Started

Preheat your Oven: Set your oven to the lowest possible temperature. For me, it was 170F. Low and slow is the motto here.

Washing the Herbs: Make sure you have washed and thoroughly dried your herbs before you put them in the oven. You want to ensure there is no bacteria on your herbs as the temperature they are drying at is so low, it is dehydrating them and not baking them (there is big, key difference here!). I like to wash mine the night before and lay them out on paper towel to dry. Doing this not only ensures there is no lingering moisture (lingering moisture will cause the herbs to bake in the oven rather than dry, remember the key difference I mentioned just recently?) before I put them in the oven, but it also speeds up the time they take in the oven, by a lot.

Preparing the Herbs for Drying: Make sure your herbs are sufficiently dried off. Separate them so they lay flat on the parchment lined baking sheets. This will ensure they are able to dry in the oven efficiently. When arranging them on your prepared baking sheet, make sure they are not overlapping or too crowded.

Drying the Herbs

Quick tip: Each variety of herb will require a different amount of time. For example: parsley took me 25 minutes to dry in the oven after lying out overnight; basil took me 40 minutes to dry in the oven after lying out overnight.

• Place the prepared herbs into your preheated oven, onto the rack that is the closest to the middle. Check every 15 minutes.
• You will know the herbs are done when they have changed color slightly and crumble easily between your fingers.

Storing the Herbs

Once you have dried the herbs in the oven, you will now need to crumble all the herbs. To do this, use your fingers and remove the stems—they are bitter and may not be fully dried, so they will not store well. Once your herbs are all crumbled, have the stems removed, and are fully cooled, you will now want to store them in airtight jars, containers, or bags. Use within one year to enjoy them while they have optimal flavor!

For more simple recipes, click here.