You are making spaghetti sauce and you find you have no fresh or dried basil, thyme or oregano. This is a good time to reach for an edible essential oil to ensure the flavors you desire as well as adding some nutritional and healing benefits. Though not all essential oils are edible, many are and they can be very handy when you are out of fresh herbs.
You are making spaghetti sauce and you find you have no fresh or dried basil, thyme or oregano. This is a good time to reach for an edible essential oil to ensure the flavors you desire as well as adding some nutritional and healing benefits. Though not all essential oils are edible, many are and they can be very handy when you are out of fresh herbs.
You must be careful to read labels, however, when buying essential oils for cooking. You want oils that are pure. The national Food and Drug Administration only requires that 2 to 3 percent of the contents of commercial essential oils be pure. The other 97 percent can be fillers or even toxic chemicals. Be sure you are purchasing oils from a reputable source that guarantees purity.
Pure essential oils are highly concentrated products that have been extracted from aromatic plants. More than 500 different plants contain useful oils and most of these are extracted through a distillation process. For distillation, you need a still. Many different designs for stills that you can make exist but if you plan to do a lot of distillation, you may want to spend a few hundred dollars and get a good one. The process is not complicated once you have a working still. Many YouTube videos are available that can help you build a still as well as learn how to use one to get the best oil.
Once you explore the process of distilling your own oil, you will understand why these oils in their pure form can be so expensive and are so powerful. For example, a pound of rose oil is the result of distilling 5,000 pounds of rose petals. The strength of a plant’s oil compared to that of the fresh plant is also staggering. One drop of peppermint oil, for instance, has the same amount of tasty and healing peppermint oil as 28 cups of peppermint tea.
People who advise against ingesting essential oils have good reason. They know the power of the oils and they also know that not all oils we can buy in the store are pure. Local essential oils expert Laura Lease will be addressing these issues in her upcoming classes while also describing ways you can use essential oils safely and responsibly in your everyday recipes.
Lease is offering two opportunities to learn about cooking with essential oils. A class at noon Saturday will be held at Tropical Edibles Nursery in Captain Cook. A second class will be held at 6 p.m. Dec. 18 at Ginger Hill Farm in Kealakekua. The classes are $30 and include product sampling as well as hands-on experience creating tasty items made with oils.
Lease will also provide a handy reference booklet for each student. To get more information or register for the classes, email Lease at laura@whereveriaroma.com or visit her on Sunday mornings at the South Kona Green Market at Amy Greenwell Garden.
The benefits of cooking with essential oils are many. Drying herbs causes them to lose about 90 percent of their oil and healing nutrients, whereas the distillation process captures all of these. The resulting oils are often more than 50 times more potent than the herbs from which they are derived. Oils are the purest parts of the plant so using them in recipes can boost the nutritional and healing benefits of your food. Adding even a half drop or a toothpick dipped in oil to a glass of water can offer a big flavor enhancement as well as a nutritional boost.
Good ones for this simple use include peppermint, lemon and ginger oils. Be sure to drink this flavored water from a glass container as the pure oils are strong enough to damage plastic or Styrofoam. A drop or two of basil, thyme and oregano oil can be used to add wonderful flavor to your spaghetti sauce and they have the advantage of a very long shelf life.
Many of the fresh and dried herbs and spices we commonly use to prepare food also exist as essential oils Used sparingly, these natural essences can add a new twist to favorite recipes and create bold flavors in sauces, marinades, beverages, desserts and more.
Tropical gardening helpline
Jenine asks: I want to make a fizzy decaffeinated kombucha. I have the scoby (kombucha’s “mother mushroom”) and have learned the process from a class, but I’d rather make it with fruit juice than black tea. Will that work? What do I need to do to make it fizzy?
Answer: The short answer to your first question is, “No” but there is more to the story. The kombucha scoby feeds on several elements in the leaves of the Camellia sinensis or tea plant. Green tea, which has less caffeine can be used successfully. Most herbal tisanes (teas made from plants other than tea) have essential oils in them, however, which are too strong and can harm your scoby. Fruit juices do not contain the elements needed to get the same fermentation process going. Though a few other liquid “starters” can be used, the health of your scoby will suffer over time and it may not produce well.
You can remove a lot of the caffeine from green or black tea by pouring hot water over it and letting it sit for a minute. The second tea you make from the decaffeinated leaves will have less than half the caffeine as before the short steep. If you want to make a totally decaffeinated kombucha you can use African honey bush or rooibos teas. They seem to contain the proper nutrients to feed the scoby, though not quite as well as black tea.
It is recommended if you decide to use one of the African teas that you do a round using black or green tea (Camellia sinensis) every few batches to keep your scoby healthy and happy. If you want fizzy kombucha, you’ll probably need to bottle it. Put the finished product in a clean bottle with a firm cap and let it sit outside the refrigerator for about four days. Adding some ginger root can also help get the secondary fermentation going. In the bottle, the fermentation process continues but the CO2 cannot escape and so this adds bubbles to your kombucha. You can always add fruit juice to finished kombucha to flavor your product.
Videos on these processes abound online. Check them out to prevent problems with bottling and adding juice.
Email plant questions to konamg@ctahr.hawaii.edu for answers by certified master gardeners. Some questions will be chosen for inclusion in this column.
Diana Duff is a plant adviser, educator and consultant living on an organic farm in Captain Cook.