Cooking Herbs: Cutting Costs

One of the things that makes cooking a lot easier is having plenty of cooking herbs and seasonings on hand.

If you have a natural grocer or health food store that sells bulk cooking herbs in 3 oz. quantities, that makes cooking with herbs much easier and cheaper.

If you don't have such a resource, you can find bulk single cooking herbs on the My Spice Sage website in 4 oz. quantities.

I would recommend buying a 3 or 4 oz. quantity of each herb. I will go to Vitamin Cottage: Natural Grocers and buy their bulk herbs for seasoning. Many of them are organic and you get a much larger quantity in the plastic bag than you would in one of those pre-packaged glass bottles of herbs.

I would recommend buying single herbs only, and make up your own herb blends for certain flavors. Single herbs are much cheaper and more pure than pre-made spice blends.

An example is the homemade taco seasoning I make for spicing up ground beef salads. It is easy, and there are tons of recipes online for Autoimmune Protocol taco seasoning recipes. It cost me $17.00 to make up a huge three year supply of taco seasoning that is stored in my airtight tin of bulk herbs.

I use that tin to store my bulk herb plastic bags, but I bought small glass bottles for my herbs that are stored in a drawer right next to my stove.

I put labels on the glass bottles listing the herb or seasoning blend that I make up in my inexpensive label maker. That is a great investment, by the way. They are available at most office supply stores and there is usually a very inexpensive base model. You want a model that uses inexpensive label cartridges. That is the most important price point. You want one that has inexpensive standard size label cartridges that will be around for years to come. The price of the label maker itself is far less important, because you will buy the label maker once, while the label cartridges are a recurring expense.

One of the spices that is essential is salt. I prefer to buy Redmond's Real Salt brand in the large plastic bag. It is just as healthy as Himalayan pink salt, but it is significantly cheaper and mined in Utah, so it is better for the environment to buy Real Salt than Himalayan salt that is flown and trucked thousands of miles to come to the USA. It is sold in the large plastic bag at Whole Foods, or you can buy it from Amazon easily if you don't have a natural grocer that carries the large bags.

Some of my most commonly used herbs are dill, granulated garlic, and granulated onion. My most commonly used homemade herb blends are an Italian blend, Herbs de Provence blend, and an Autoimmune Protocol ( or AIP) taco seasoning blend.

I would look up AIP recipes for those blends and buy all the herbs in the recipes in addition to the Real Salt, granulated garlic, granulated onion, and dried dill. Dill seems to be the secret that turns vegetables and soups from tasting okay to tasting amazing.

When you make up your herb blends, I would make up a batch that will 3/4 fill a sandwich bag. I would then label the sandwich bag with the name of the herb blend and an "expiration" date of two years in the future.

Dried herbs don't really expire, but after two years the flavor intensity starts degrading noticeably. It is a good idea to check the flavor of the herb blend or your single herbs after that point and decide if you should throw out what is left and buy a new 3 or 4 oz. package of bulk herbs.

Make sure you label a two year expiry date on your bags of single herbs as well as your homemade herb blends, because the single herbs will also lose flavor after that point as well.

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