Italian seasoning
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Blend
- 15 g dried oregano, the backbone; Greek or Italian, not Mexican oregano rounded
- 10 g dried marjoram, the one most shop blends skip, and the one that makes it taste right rounded
- 10 g dried basil rounded
- 8 g dried thyme rounded
- 6 g dried rosemary, crushed or ground; whole needles are unpleasant to bite rounded
- 5 g dried sage rounded
- 4 g garlic granules, granules, not powder, which cakes rounded
- 2 g dried chilli flakes, optional, and a small amount rounded
Method
Method
- Crush the rosemary before anything else. Whole dried rosemary needles are like small splinters. Grind them in a mortar or pulse them alone until they are coarse crumbs.
- Combine everything in a jar and shake. That is it.
- Store in a sealed jar away from the hob. Heat and light are what kill dried herbs, and the cupboard above the cooker is the worst place in the kitchen.
Notes
- No salt in the blend. Every blend you can buy is mostly salt, which is why you cannot season with them freely. Keeping salt out means you can add a heaped spoon of this to a sauce without wrecking the seasoning.
- Marjoram is the missing ingredient. It is oregano’s sweeter, softer relative, and it is what most people are unconsciously missing when a homemade Italian blend tastes flat and dusty.
- Bloom it in fat. Dried herbs are fat-soluble and taste of very little sprinkled on at the end. Add them to the oil with the onions and garlic, not to the finished pot.
- It has a shelf life. Dried herbs are stale in about a year, and this makes enough for roughly that. Write the date on the jar.
Ingredient substitutions
- Mexican oregano is a different plant with a citrus and liquorice edge. It is excellent and it belongs in the Tex-Mex blend on this site, not in this one.
- Fresh herbs cannot be swapped in one for one. As a rule use three times the volume of fresh for dried, added at the end rather than the beginning.