Dehydrate Chives with your Grill!
Chives are a great garden perennial as they come back ever year, they look beautiful and have lovely purple flowers in the spring, and chives are the perfect addition to a lot of recipes! You can even eat the blooms!
To preserve your spring abundance for later in the year, you can cut chives and dehydrate them – and you don’t need a dehydrator to do it!
Chives should be dried at a low temperature, between 95 and 125 degrees is ideal, so a grill that’s in the sun is the perfect place to dehydrate chives (or other herbs).
Here’s how:
- Cut Chives near base
- Rinse chives in a salad spinner and spin to dry
- Chop or cut chives with scissors into small 1/4″ pieces
- Spread out onto pans lined with parchment paper
- Place inside sun-warmed grill, let nature do it’s thing! You can shake them once or twice to help they dry faster after an hour or two. Let them stay in there until they are crispy and dry (usually 3-6 hours)
- Put into glass herb jar and use for the rest of the year!
I “chop” my chives with kitchen scissors to cut them down for drying. No, they’re not super uniform, yours may be more perfectly cut than mine!
Our grill that sits in the sun usually has a resting temperature of ~120˚ F – which is perfect for dehydrating chives! I don’t have to turn the grill on, or use any gas – the solar heat from the sun does the trick!
Shake your chives occasionally to help speed the drying process up and move them. You want just one layer of chives so they can dry efficiently.
After a 3-6 hours, your chives should be crispy and dry and ready to put into a jar and into the spice cabinet! Store them out of direct light to keep them fresh.