Recipes & Nutrition Bits

I read recently in Nigela’s How to Eat cookbook that an easy way to bring your dishes up a few notches on the ‘ooh wow, that’s yummy’ scale is to use infused oil.

So I went to the store and found Bärlauch infused sesame oil. It wasn’t cheap (5 € 250 ml) but it was fantastic to use in everything that could use a bite. But I went through the bottle pretty quickly and that’s when I started to wonder how to get my hands on more infused oils.

Last night I went to Karstadt and checked out their gourmet supermarket floor. I found 500 ml bottled olive oil with garlic and rosemary selling for 12 Euro. Hol-y hell-o! Screw this! I’m making my own.

I like Aldi’s Castello olive oil. It has just the right bite/bitterness and for 3-something € for 500ml, I’m a happy cook wannabe. For my oily herb experiment, I needed a bottle to work with and I’m too cheap and lazy at the moment to go to the fancy bottle store. I transfered some other left over Aldi-brand sesame oil into the empty bottle with Bärlauch for some mild infusion (we’ll see if it works).

Now with the newly emptied bottle, I poured some Aldi olive oil over crushed leaves of rosemary and thyme from my balcony garden. I also added some sliced garlic. For the next two weeks, the bottle will sit by the kitchen window and I’ll give it a shake every morning. When that is done, I’ll strain out the leaves and if necessary repeat the process until I get the flavor I want.

• Things that are great for Herb oils: Basil, Tarragon, Thyme, Fennel, and Rosemary.
• Things that are great for Herb vinegar: Basil, Tarragon, Dill, Fennel, and Mint. But also Bohnenkraut (summer savory) or Pimpernelle/Wiesenknopf (salad burnet) work well too.

The end result looks exactly like what you’d find at the store for the price of your first born for astronomically less. Now if I can only get the price of plain peanut oil to get down from 6€/1L.