Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY

Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY
Oregano
Ladies & Gentlemen, the Greater Oregano!
Native, perennial aromatic plant, medicinal, industrial, excellent flavor and great bee-keeping plant, known since antiquity. Who do we know it fresh and blooming, how many have collected and dried it, how many we use it or how much it is unknown?
Rhetorical inquiries about the oregano in order to make an effort to approach the matter and see how we can harvest, drain or even cultivate -why not- our own oregano, not least the Greek village tomato salad with feta cheese and Oregano is our gourmet ambassador around the world!
And here I am going to tell you a secret… if you are near mountains, hills, and slopes go out and meet her. If you are urban, you can not have a balcony, a sunny window will be there, then cultivate your oregano and then everything else that smells like a oregano will never be yours anymore!
Its therapeutic properties, look for them and you will find, here today we learn to gather, dry it, scrub it to show its aromas and to put it in jars to taste our food and our mood!
Yours!

work: 1h:00′ time: 1 εβδομάδα very easy:


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Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY

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Ingredients

  • freshly cut, blooming oregano shoots
  • kitchen string
  • scissors
Cut the blooming branches of the oregano when it is fully blooming. Its flowering varies from area to area and from altitude to altitude. Surely this happens in the summer from June to August.
We choose to harvest the oregano a dry day so that leaves and flowers are not damp. We do not eradicate the plant. Cut, with scissors, twigs 20-25cm (~10 in) in length and 10cm (3.9 in) from the ground. We take care not to remove all the flowering shoots from each plant, but to have 1-2 shoots. The seeds that will result from them will help to multiply the plant.
Cut a piece of string ~30cm (~11.8 in). With the blooming twigs we make small double bunches and tie one to each end of the string.
This makes it easy to hang them once one sits higher than the other without touching each other to ventilate and dry properly without the oregano getting black.
If we hang it out of the house always in shade, we gather it in the evening to avoid moisture. Our oregano was little and we let it dry in the house.
In a week the oregano is dry.
Then we get a large dry basin and start rubbing the twigs with our hands to drop the oregano into the basin. The branches will stay dry and hard in our hands to throw them and continue with the next bouquet.
After rubbing the whole oregano clean it with small sticks that may have fallen into the basin. If it's too much, we pass it through a thick strainer to keep the chopsticks. Finally, let the oregano dry in the basin for a few more days.
If we want to ripen it, we go through the blender and make it as delicate as we like it. At this point we take deep inhalations and its perfume will be indelibly recorded in our memory!
We store it in jars to have oregano all year long so that our village salad is never "poor".
Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY Picking & Drying of Fresh Oregano-DIY

Author Zambia G. Sifaki