We’re going to share one of our signature recipes we do every year! If you’ve got a ton of basil to use up, you’d be wise to keep this one in your back pocket!
Put simply, there is only so much pesto one can make, and more importantly, tolerate. Basil oil is an excellent addition to have at the ready and is great as a method of using up the remainder of your basil harvest. It’s easy to get rid of cups and cups of basil this way! We do this one every year and love putting them in tomato soup, pasta dishes and even as a basis for oil in marinades. We find basil oil far more flexible than pesto across a lot of different dishes. You can find our signature recipe for our basil oil in the comments!
Making basil oil is exceptionally simple. Simply combine the ingredients into a food processor or blender, blend to your preferred consistency and then freeze into ice cube trays. Once frozen, just put all the cubes into a ziplock bag and use them as needed. Since texture isn’t a big deal with these, basil oil can be stored for an exceptionally long time in the freezer. We never need much time around here and we’re always missing these come the following spring.
There are alternate ways of going about this as well, should you just want to capture your basil and not develop a more complex sauce. Simply freezing your basil in either water or a broth (chicken, fish, beef, etc) is also an excellent preservation technique. To do this, we usually finely chop our basil, put them into ice cube trays and then top the trays with water. Again, freeze them, pop them out once frozen and put the cubes into ziplock bags.
We do this with our Thai basil so we can have an occasional winter time Basil Mojito or anytime we want that anise-focused flavor in our food. We generally take this approach for any “specialty” basils we grow and use our standard Basil Oil for our sweet/Genovese style basil.
If you’re looking for a way to burn up that basil in a highly flexible way, these two methods will take you a long, long way!
