I Preserved A Thing: Freezing BASIL

Thanks to pack rats and mice chopping, dropping, and munching entire tomato, pepper, okra plants, and greens off, it has been a challenging growing season. They’ve annihilated my garden. Swiss chard and my new outside garden do provide, though! I got a late planting start, so the garden goods have been slow.

One thing that I grew prolifically both last year and this year is BASIL.

I am not very familiar with pesto, and I hesitate to use cups of nuts or seeds to make it. What if it doesn’t turn out!? Or we don’t like it? I hesitate to try things that require expensive ingredients and feel like a risk in taste and texture.

So last year, I figured out I could freeze minced/chopped basil coated liberally in olive oil! I froze them in cubes and then stored them in a bag. It is so easy to pull out nuggets of fresh garden basil for spaghetti and curry all winter long!

The process is super easy and doesn’t require any recipe. I remove all the leaves from the stems before soaking them in cold water and spinning the basil. After patting it to get the leaves as dry as possible, I chopped it by hand because Livia was napping, but I think it would be worth trying a food processor. I was okay with having larger pieces and not having the noise or cleanup.

Then I just stirred EVOO until all the leaves were coated heavily, but none was pooling in the bottom of the bowl. I spread some out onto parchment-lined cookie sheets to freeze, then crumble and store broken apart in a ziplock. I also froze some in a mold for loose cubes! This basil will last me the entire year! I LOVE having the ability to freeze as a preserving method.

You will have to try it out and share how you found it worked best for you to process your basil!