What to Do with All Those Chives In Your Garden
As much as we love our chives and other herbs that come back every year – we often are left with an overabundance of the herbs to use up or process. Since Chives are so prolific, and one of the first harvests of the season, we’ve started to become inventive on how to use them in the garden. We have four different ways just to use Chives or preserve them to use later.
If you’re looking for something to do with just chive blossoms, we have some great ideas too. But if your chives
Use them Fresh
There’s really nothing as good as fresh chives – it’s as simple as chopping them up on your dish for a bit of fresh oniony flavor. Easy to do, but this will only use a small number of chives up each time.
Freeze Them For Later
Another great way to extend that fresh taste throughout the season is to chop up the chives and freeze them. The great thing about chives is they won’t clump together while freezing. You can add them to a plastic bottle or a jar and pop them in the freezer. The small size means they thaw in minutes. Just shake out what you want when you want to serve them and you’ll have fresh chive flavor long into the winter.
Dehydrated Chives
Dehydrating chopped-up chives is a great way to keep your harvest well into the winter and beyond. Not only is it easy to do, but the dehydrating process means they take up less pace. Vacuum seal your dehydrated chives in a mason jar to keep them better even longer.
To Dehydrate your chives, chop them into 1-inch pieces or smaller. Place in your dehydrator in a single layer without overlapping and dehydrate at 95 degrees (or the lowest your dehydrator will go) for about 8 hours, or until dry and crunchy – super easy to do!
Chive Powder
Chive Powder might be one of my favorite uses of our chives from the garden. Not only is it super easy, but it is used in our spice mixes all of the time. After dehydrating your chives, take about 1/3 of your dehydrated chive pieces and place them in your blender or food processor. Blend or blitz until it is a fine powder. Not only will this reduce the storage space needed even more – but it gives you a fun alternative to use in your own spice blends.
We use Chive Powder in recipes whenever onion powder is called for, it adds a bit of oniony flavor but also a bit of garden-fresh green to the dishes as well.
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