I had seen a recipe that calls for fresh flower petals – a dark bread recipe with honey and bright flower petals through it, specifically. I know it wanted fresh petals for the color (dried so often dulls the colors), flexibility, and perhaps for the scent all of which drying often changes in herbs.
Would freezing work, do you think, for storing petals for this recipe without too much change? They are going to be baked into the bread, so the petals don't have to be garnish-perfect, so a little limp or slightly dull would be fine.
But if it will affect the color a lot, or change the texture in dramatic ways – more than drying and reconstituting them would – then it's not useful for this kind of recipe.
Does anyone have experience with flower petals, or even freezing fresh herbs for use in baking since the fragility would be similar?
Best Answer
If you're baking them I think there is a strong chance the color will change no matter what. But you might consider sugaring them first.
To do that separate an egg or two and whip the whites to frothy. Paint the petals with the whipped egg whites and coat with superfine sugar. The trick here is to reduce the water in the flowers as well as the water activity in the eggwhites. What I used to do was set the sugared flowers on a cooling rack. When done with all of them I'd dump them into a locking plastic rectangular container. Basically an upside down Tupperware cake container. It had about 1/2 inch of sugar in the bottom and the flowers on top. I put them in the fridge. I knew others that left them out still others just put the sugared flowers on cookie sheet and left them in warm but off oven overnight. I'm not sure it really matters.