Drying parsley is a great way to preserve garden-grown parsley when you have too much. And as far as I can tell, there’s no “best” way to do it—you just have to get it dried out.
Drying Parsley
Although I am a first-time gardener and failed at most of the crops I attempted, I did have success with parsley. But now I have a different problem: too much parsley.
It was a bit overwhelming to be honest. I had a lot and I didn’t know what to do with it. I did consider transplanting it from my garden plot into a pot on my balcony but it’s just so full already with chives, mint, and tomato plants. Like, full. So I decided to dry it.
Online I looked up a few recipes and how-to achieve dried parsley. What I learned was there is no one right way to do it. So I took advice from the web page I I trusted the most and tried it out.
Update: The dried parsley recipe I used no longer exists but this one from One Good Thing is close.
For all of the recipes using the oven the drying instructions follow three basic steps.
- Wash parsley and pat dry
- Cut off stems
- Put on baking tray and put in oven at lowest possible temperature for 30 minutes or until leaves crumble into tiny bits
Dried parsley sounds easy peasy!
Here’s how dried parsley went for me
In hindsight, I realize I needed to keep the oven door propped open a tiny bit to allow the moisture from the herbs to release. I had been cooking tater tots at a low temperature prior to this dried parsley attempt so “cooling” wasn’t a long process. That said it made virtually zero impact on the damp parsley. OK so I didn’t quite pat dry it enough. Should I also mention I skipped the cutting the stems part because it seemed like too much work?
Anyway, so I ended up turning the oven on to the lowest setting and spread the parsley out quite thin on cookie sheets. It worked but it took two hours at least. Ages.
I am happy with the dried parsley, but for the past couple weeks while I’ve crushed it up I’ve been picking the stems out of the mess.
So there we go. Just another PSA to follow the instructions.
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