More of a Good Thing
Published On: August 13, 2013

The herb salts have proven to be a tremendous hit.  The lavender salt may possibly have found its way onto the rim of a glass or two, and the others have been used in just about everything we’ve cooked since we made them.  Given this success, I decided to go ahead and make some basil salt while the plants were still going strong.  But, as my fingers are just now recovered from the chopping extravaganza (and as basil is a bit leafier and wetter than the other herbs), I went with a slightly different approach.

Mini chop to the rescue.

I picked basil until I started to worry I’d hurt the plant.  About two cups or so.

I chopped it up by itself to start.  It looks absolutely vile at this point.  Tinned spinach vile. I considered not posting this pic, but I didn’t want you to worry if you did the same thing and it looked like this.

Once it was nicely smushed up, I added in a bit of my salt.  I’m using a fine grain salt here instead of the coarse sea salt I used for the others.  I whizzed this up (scraping down the sides every now and then), until the basil more or less disintegrated.

I added more salt, more or less just eyeballing it until it looked bright bright green and fairly dry.  There was a moment where it went from ‘white salt specked with green basil’ (as seen earlier in the pictures) to ‘green salt’ (as seen in the picture above), and I think that’s the transition you’re looking for.  It was about a cup and a half of salt all together. Then it went in a baking dish and in the oven on the lowest setting for an hour or two to dry out, and in a jar within ready reach of the stove for gratuitous use in future kitchen exploits.

The only downside is that all this pruning seems to be making the herb plants grow more vigorously than ever.  If I stop posting for a while, send gardeners.  Gardeners with machetes.

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