Dehydrating herbs – leaves vs. stems

dehydratingfood-preservationherbs

I use my dehydrator to dehydrate herbs such as parsley and dill. I use low temperature (95 F = 35 C) to preserve the taste. The dark-green leaves are usually completely dry after several hours, but the light-green stems remain slightly wet.

At one time, I made the mistake of putting everything together in a jar; it caught the mold in several days and I had to trash it.

I tried to cut the stems from the leaves and dehydrate them separately, but it turned out to be a very tedious task as each piece has a different length so I had to cut each piece separately.

What do you do?

Best Answer

Both parsley and dill has a lot of flavour in the stems.

Freezing is good, as suggested by Joe, but maybe chopping the stems with a machine/grinder prior to drying might help the process. Discard them if the stems are really woody of course.