Drying Oregano

I discovered that homegrown and dried oregano is much, much nicer than anything I could buy anywhere – that includes Market Spice, my “gold standard” for all things spice and herb, incidentally. This year, I managed to forget about it until my oregano had taken over a significant amount of garden real estate, but I am starting to catch up.

I grabbed a couple of fistfuls from the garden and sorted them out on the kitchen counter. No flowers, roots, brown leaves welcome.

Then a quick rinse. I don’t spray my garden with chemicals, so I only used water to get any dust off.

Patted dry between a couple layers of clean dish towel…

Then, arrange on the dryer rack.

I’ve dried it both ways – on the stem, and removing the leaves from the stem before drying. I dried this batch on the stems, and came to the conclusion that it’s worth the time to strip the leaves off before drying; I end up with less stem debris and whole leaves that way. However, crumbling the dried leaves off the dried stems – and picking out the bits of stem from the pile afterwards – also works just fine, as it did in this case.

When drying it stems and all, you don’t need inserts on the drying trays. If you strip off the leaves, then I recommend spreading them on fruit leather inserts. They can be piled an inch or so deep; the air gets around them and dries it all just fine. Dry at 95 degrees (lowest setting) overnight in the dehydrator.

Finished and in the jar. I wish I could show you how green it really is; the picture just doesn’t do it justice. Much deeper in color, and in my opinion, flavor, than the grocery store and online varieties!