If you’re cooking on a budget, or only cooking for just one person, you might be tempted to just pass over the new herbs. In the end, when money is tight, spending $1.50 on cilantro is only going to offer you a garnish but spending $1.50 on lettuce will give you a meal’s worth of vegetables – or even more! And for the single cooks, it’s endlessly frustrating to buy an enormous couple of something and then have 2/3 of it get slimy and gross in the fridge.
If money is really so tight that you can’t afford a few dollars on fresh herbs, then you’re probably making the right choice spending that money on other vegetables instead, and hats off for you for perseverance and determination for keeping Paleo regardless! But in other cases, you might like to reconsider: fresh herbs have great health advantages, and there’s ways to cook them for each cooking style.
HEALTH ADVANTAGES of Herbs ricette e sapori
The trouble with reports on medical benefits of herbs is the fact so many are overhyped. A lot of studies go something similar to this: first, the researchers purify some compound in the herb, standardize it, and concentrate it to levels that might be impossible to get from eating the fresh plant. They feed the purified, concentrated active ingredient to rats (or sometimes inject it directly into their bodies, or input it directly on tumor cells in a test tube), and observe that they have some effect. The researchers report this as something similar to “Composition and Antiproliferative Aftereffect of GAS of Origanum vulgare Against Tumor Cell Lines” (yes, that’s an actual study) but the media repackages it as “Oregano cures cancer!”
If you’re going to bypass purifying your herbs and injecting them directly into your tissues, these studies will provide you with a decent notion of what things to expect. But they don’t inform you of the health advantages of eating some oregano in your tomato sauce. So leaving out the unwarranted hype, what exactly are the actual health benefits associated with herbs?
Antioxidants
The antioxidants in herbs (and spices) may not cause you to cancer-proof however they do help protect your meal from oxidative damage, even at levels a normal person might reasonably eat. Just adding herbs to a meal or marinating sauce can help protect any fats they touch.
Oxidative damage is a problem because it makes fats in particular more inflammatory and less healthy, so protecting against it is a major benefit. This is particularly great if you’re cooking anything fatty over high heat: marinate those chicken thighs before you grill them!
Food Safety
Food fraud is a major problem, and dried, jarred seasonings are a few of the largest targets. How would you like to find out you’re actually getting some chickory, bark, sawdust, grass, or other random contaminants with your jar of basil?
With fresh herbs, you can completely avoid that possibility, because it’s much, a lot more difficult to pass off bark or sawdust as a couple of fresh basil than it is to sneak them in as fillers to the dried jar. So you’re protecting yourself automatically from the lion’s share of potential contaminants.
Other Benefits
There are many other proven benefits to herbal extracts or essential oils – for example, peppermint oil is quite a powerful treatment for IBS and other digestion disorders. That’s powerful stuff, but in that case you’re using the herb as medicine, much less food. Which can be an article about the great things about putting peppermint in your salad, not the advantages of taking peppermint oil in purified form as a pill.
Herbal medicine is interesting and powerful, but it’s not similar thing as eating herbs in normal quantities in your meals. Of course, if culinary use of herbs is what you would like to study, the data for all your anti-cancer, anti-diabetes, anti-Alzheimer’s benefits is thin. It’s useless and misleading to state that oregano cures cancer in real live humans just because a purified extract killed isolated cancer cells in a test tube.
It may perfectly be true that the great things about the extracts extend to the herbs, but without actual studies on herbs in the diet, it’s impossible to say for sure (especially since cooking the herbs changes their composition even more, with unknown effects on the benefits). So for now, we’ll leave the benefits at the antioxidants and food safety – and if you wish to look at all the several uses of herbal extracts in supplements, there’s a cheat sheet for your!
Buying, Cooking, and Storing Herbs
How and where to buy
You can purchase fresh herbs in the produce portion of any grocery store, but if you have access to them, check out ethnic markets for far better deals and a fresher selection.
If you’ve got a sunny window (or better yet, a garden), you can also grow an plants yourself and save big money – they’re very easy to take care of and the seeds are incredibly cheap. So that as an added bonus, you don’t have to worry about freshness, since you can just snip off what you need as you will need it.
If you never use them before it goes bad
It’s about preservation! Fresh herbs are fragile, if you don’t use the whole bunch in weekly roughly, you’ll need to find some way to keep them safe.
One foolproof way to save lots of herbs is to freeze them in essential olive oil. Then just pop out the cubes of olive oil to use when you desire a flavored fat for cooking. (If you’re making multiple flavors of frozen oil cubes, this is your advance warning to label the bags: you will not be able to tell parsley from basil on sight after freezing!)
Alternately, check the freezer portion of your supermarket. Most of them carry convenient little pre-frozen packages of herbs (no oil, just the herbs) that you can pop out like ice out of the mold.
Another tactic is to dry the herbs yourself: here’s helpful information to that.
Using Fresh Herbs
What can you cook with fresh herbs? Well, everything!
Make condiments. Fresh herbs will spice up the taste of from pesto to salad dressings to salsa. One recipe for inspiration: Salted Herbs (The Healthy Foodie).
Add them right to salads. If your greens are receiving dull, try shredding some mint or parsley right into the mix. One recipe for inspiration: Persian Herb SaladEgg muffins
Just about almost any herbs is going well in a batch of mini frittatas!
(THE TINY Plantation) – American readers, remember that “coriander” in British English identifies the herb you understand as “cilantro,” not coriander seeds.
Rub them on meat. Several sprigs of rosemary over your fish, some fresh thyme rubbed into a chicken: there’s nothing to it. One recipe for inspiration: Skillet Rosemary Chicken (Paleo Leap).
Put them in eggs. Garnish a frittata with fresh herbs, or maybe throw them into omelets instead of dried.
Make tea with them. Mint is the apparent choice, but you can make herb tea with all types of herbs. One recipe for inspiration: Sage Tea (The Herb Gardener).
Additional recipes merely to get you started:
Grain-free Herbed Cauliflower Rice (Colorful Eats Nutrition)
Herb-Infused Oils (Paleo + Life)
Fresh Herb Soup (Seasonal and Savory)
Spicy Chicken with Herb Sauce (Paleo Leap)
You can even substitute fresh herbs for dry herbs in recipes; a good rule of thumb is to use three times the amount of fresh. So in case a recipe {ca