Kitchen Garden Forum

I was lucky enough to acquire a huge spray of surplus pruned bay leaves at our village gardening plant swap event today.
They,re still attached to the stems at the moment.

Can anybody please advise me on the best way of drying/preserving them to try and retain their maximum aroma in cooking.
Some of the commercial ones I,ve had to buy in the past have ended up totallyi flavourless.
I don,t know whether this is due to length of storage or other reasons.

Primrose, I got rid of our bay tree last year because it became too large and cumbersome to heave into the greenhouse every late autumn. But I picked all the best leaves, gave them a gentle wipe with damp kitchen paper and then froze them on a flat baking tray. They are now in a bag in the freezer and will last out our lifetime (unless we live to 120). The freezer tip was given to me by a friend who had been a WI cookery judge.

Oh thanks for that tip Monika. To be honest, I don't know why, I never thought of freezing them but that's probably a good idea and worth trying.
To be honest I've now got a lifetime's supply too. The only thing that bothers me is that if I've got them in a big jar in the cupboard with all my other dried herbs they're less likely to be forgotten to be used than tucked away in the freezer !

Well done Monika. My house has been heated by a solid fuel boiler which during the very cold snap just before last Christmas the boiler finally gave up the ghost. Now I have always dried my Bay Leaves simply on top of the boiler and now I have an oil boiler situated outside the house I have been wondering what to do. You have solved my problem immediately and like Primrose it had not ocurred to me that to freeze them was the answer. It takes one old'n to teach another old'n what to do. I thank you so much.
Sincerely,
JB.