One of the valuable winter season tasks that we do is to perform further preparation and preservation of our various herbs into a “final form” if you will. Some may not realize this, but you can home craft a lot of different kinds of herb and spice mixtures at home.
When doing this kind of work, a super helpful tool to have in the repertoire is a high speed coffee grinder. We use this tool to get our herbs (and other dehydrated products) into either a granulated or powder form. We’re often working with somewhat small amounts, so this is a lot more ideal than a food processor or blender. This tool also does a much better job at making powders. Plus, you can use it to grind super fresh coffee beans, which is the only “right way” to do it!
For some things, we might do multiple levels of preparation. For example, with onions, we might want chunky dried onions, granulated onions, onion powder and also further powders to do things like onion salt. There’s literally no difference in your “source product” (e.g. onions in this case), it’s just how deeply you prepare the dehydrated product so that it achieves your desired final form.
You might recall that one of the things we did this year was dehydrate some of our celery leaves, a pretty decent sized batch. Our goal in this case was to create a home made celery salt. While the product you buy at the grocer is often made from celery seed, it’s even more tasty (and a really cool green color) if you make it from the leaves. For salted herbs like this, we typically start with something around a 2 to 1 ratio, product to salt.
There’s a lot of flexibility when you home craft your own spice mixes like this. For example, if you’re trying to reduce your sodium consumption, you can simply use less salt in your mixes. Or maybe even use a salt substitute instead. Or, maybe your pepper powders aren’t hot enough for you, or they are too hot. That won’t be a problem if you make it from peppers that suit your taste!
Also, we don’t do all this work all at once. We often stagger the work out over multiple weeks and even months over the winter. Some of the herbs are dehydrated during the growing season to get them into a preserved state. But, for other things like onions and garlic, we can simply dehydrate these at a later point since they are cured and technically preserved all ready. For these, we try to aim towards “later” in time, giving us an opportunity to use them up before they start to grow again or spoil.
One of the things we’ll share more about this winter is our herb storage techniques. But, we’ve found it really important to achieve “airtight,” which for us means getting a good seal and using glass. Air exchange is an enemy of long term storage, using proper storage techniques can literally get you into years worth of storage of herbs, spices and mixes!
This is a really valuable method of using your gardens to create additional value. These days, spice jars are going for $5 to $10 each! Each thing you make really racks up the value proposition of the garden, plus allows you to use your harvests in creative, different ways. We might take you along some of our other efforts this winter, just so you can see how it can be a diverse technique.
Oh, and one last thing! Thanks a ton to all of you that helped support our fundraiser this year! You helped us cover 80% of our annual hosting costs, which is absolutely fantastic and a great balance for us! We really appreciate the support and all of you helping us to fund our efforts over at FrostyGarden.com! You all are fantastic and we deeply appreciate everything you do for us!
