We share this particular preservation every year, it’s our favorite way to make basil disappear! And it makes for an incredibly flexible ingredient that you can use over the winter months.
When most people think of preserving basil, the kneejerk reaction is to make pesto. We like pesto as much as the next person, but we find that making basil oil is a far more flexible thing to have around the kitchen! There hasn’t been a winter in recent memory where we don’t exhaust our supply far too early!
Every season, we make up a fairly large batch of this basil oil. We’ll put our recipe down in the comments, but it’s both simple and yet extremely flavorful. We freeze our basil oil into ice cube trays, which allows us to remove them and conveniently store them in a Ziplock bag for individual use later.
Our preferred basil here is usually your standard Genovese style. You can certainly use other kinds of basil, in the event that’s what you’re growing. There is no doubt this recipe strongly features basil, so it’s best to pick a basil that you’re truly going to enjoy.
We generally pack in the basil pretty well with this recipe since the goal is to make it disappear. We generally try to use home grown garlic when we have it, but any gourmet garlic is going to give you a huge flavor boost. Our flaked chile pepper of choice in practically all cases is the Chile Pequin. We buy them pre-dried in bulk and make our own flakes. We find this far preferable over typical store bought flakes, they both pack on the flavor and kick off quite a bit more heat.
Now, why we make so much of this stuff is because it’s super flexible. You can add the cubes to tomato soup, pastas, stews and soups, as a base for chicken dishes, in marinades and so many other ways. We find so many uses for this stuff that we can’t even keep it in stock through the winter! Pesto is great and all, but it’s kind of a one trick pony. (OK, maybe a few, but I digress.)
As you’ve probably noticed by now, we do put a fair bit of effort into making sauces as one of our preferred preservation methods. We find these time consuming to make at the time of cooking, but when we can front load a lot of the effort into making bulk sauce with our home grown produce, we get a lot of flavor later without nearly as much effort. This also allows us to our preferred “fresh cooking” techniques into the winter, while still retaining a significant contribution from our summer gardens.
So, if you’re looking to burn up a lot of basil, this is how we roll. It’s a highlight of the various preservations we make each season and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
