In the kitchen, rosemary is a real all-rounder. It goes well with fish, meat, vegetables, cheese and sweet dishes such as jam or sorbet. You can use the needles and flowers fresh and preserved
Processing of fresh rosemary
Rosemary tastes best fresh from the bush, as it then still has the largest proportion of essential oils. However, these evaporate quickly, which is why you should not store the spice unpreserved for long. For fresh use, it is best to harvest whole branches and pluck off the needles you need. You can add the needles whole or chopped to the food, whereby the rosemary has to cook for as long as possible. With stews, it is possible to cook whole branches that are simply fished out again at the end of the cooking time. Incidentally, the rosemary blossoms are also edible, they make a great impression, especially as a garnish sprinkled over salads.
Preserve rosemary
Both the flowers and the leaves can be preserved in a number of ways. You can dry rosemary, freeze it or put it in vinegar or oil - just as you like. However, as with fresh rosemary, the same applies here that you do not leave the harvested branches lying around for long. Process rosemary as quickly as possible to preserve the aroma. For this reason, drying rosemary should never be exposed to the blazing sun, as the volatile essential oils will evaporate all the faster. But whether fresh or preserved: use only healthy parts of rosemary and ignore wilted or dried-up looking twigs - you will most likely not like them. Yellow spotted leaves, on the other hand, can be used in the kitchen without any worries.
tips and tricks
Older, de-needled rosemary sprigs can be used as a kebab skewer: simply pierce meat, fish, vegetable or cheese cubes and skewer them onto the rosemary sprig. The spiked skewer is then drizzled with olive oil and cooked on the grill or in the pan. The typical rosemary aroma penetrates the food through the branch.
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