Fresh Herbs Are Being Massively Mismanaged in Many Recipes. But I’ve Discovered a Brilliant Solution.

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Summer! A time for succulent squash, impossibly sweet corn, life-altering tomatoes, and, perhaps most thrilling of all, utterly enchanting fresh garden herbs. Earthy parsley, pungent oregano, refreshing mint—garden herbs are so uniquely diverse in flavor that they’re straight-up mystical. But, like the clamshell of moldering, forgotten rosemary in the back of your fridge, there’s something rotten about the way we treat all those leafy, viridescent aromatics. The truth is, herbs are often wasted. Too many recipes out there tell us to rudely chop and scatter them haphazardly or to add a sprig to a giant pot of sauce (when has that ever done anything?). Herbs have been typecast, playing the same tired, ineffective roles over and over again, and it’s a damn shame. Because use them right and they’re a proper main character—or at least they can add a hell of a lot to a dish.

Take bay leaves, the current poster child for herb mismanagement. In recent years, the lo-fi eucalyptus-flavored leaves of the laurel tree have—in their dusty, dried-out form—come to represent people’s larger distrust of herbs. What is it with this silly yet persistent notion that you can add just one brittle, little leaf to a giant pot of sauce or soup and, against all odds, a whirlwind of flavor magic will occur? This, friends, is a fundamental misunderstanding of how herbs work. But fortunately, we can do better. We simply have to show some respect and approach the plants in more intelligent ways, from determining which ones to use when to—get ready for a shake-up on this part—whether we use them at all.

First off, we have to stop pretending that dried herbs are a substitute for fresh. There’s a reason no self-respecting Italian American enjoys the dried oregano flavor of jarred pasta sauce. Alison Roman certainly isn’t using dried dill in any of her “dilly” recipes (of which there are countless iterations). Virtually no modern recipes call for dried parsley or basil. In the 1960s, the era that saw a boom of processed foods and pantry goods, dehydrated herbs—sapped of moisture and stowed away indefinitely—made a kind of sense. They were bottled like alchemist potions, and those iconic red caps of McCormick’s found a permanent residence in home pantries nationwide.

But while store-bought dried herbs may have represented convenience to the home cook, they never really did much beyond “representing” flavor. (To those of you hanging and drying your own twine-tied bundles in your Greek cottages, yes, it’s different, we know.) Thankfully, in the ’70s, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse brought forth farm-to-table ideas, and “California cooking” became co-opted by every restaurant throwing arugula on a sandwich. Herbs became an integral part of the “Fresh Is Better” movement, and they stayed there. Which is great for those of us who prefer parsley that tastes grassy rather than sawdust-y. But that rise did not necessarily come with a clear guidebook.

Which brings me to my next point: Reconsider your herb priors. Take the long-standing debate surrounding flat-leaf parsley vs. curly. Curly parsley is relegated mostly to the status of garnish, an ornamental herb usually found at eat-until-you-can’t-anymore buffets and traditional steakhouses, where a plate of overcooked sirloin and mashed potatoes needs a little zhuzh. As a former line cook, I had it repeatedly beaten into my brain that flat-leaf contains more flavor and that curly parsley is largely useless. But I have recently found that one of my favorite Lebanese restaurants uses curly parsley for its tabbouleh. The first reason: The rougher, thicker texture of curly parsley can withstand the weight of tabbouleh’s lemon juice and olive oil. The second: The chef believes that the flavor of well-sourced organic curly parsley (the good stuff) is on par with flat-leaf. It’s earthy and mild and fresh and grassy at once. Now that I had tried quality curly parsley, my mind was blown, and I began to rethink my parsley beliefs just this year.

Something else you should question: the function of herb stems. People habitually discard them, but finely chopped cilantro, parsley, and basil stems add crunchy texture while still providing that lovely herbaceous magic. Herb stems are great to add to salsas, chimichurri, leafy salads, pasta dishes, you name it. Unfortunately, your average recipe is likely to have you toss them in the trash—a crime in the home kitchen and a total waste of potential flavor and texture to boot.

Now we turn to the question of impact. Our case study: basil. Basil is delicate, expensive, and largely misused. Fresh basil is a powerful flavor enhancer because it contains essential oils, and those oils are released when the herb is heated, cut, or ripped—but it matters how that happens. Basil is best when it’s ripped with your teeth; you’re mainlining the plant’s pure flavor. But it drives me nuts when a recipe calls for basil to be added to tomato sauce, as so many do. It’s bay leaf syndrome all over again. Simmering basil imparts very little of its flavor to the passata; to get the most of those previously sweet and minty essential oils, the herb should be added at the end to the pasta dish or pizza itself, freshly ripped and consumed quickly for maximum flavor. Sorry to say, but the handful of leaves that come steamed on your delivery pie should go straight into the compost.

In general, simmering fresh herbs, especially a small amount, for any real length of time in a larger preparation, is just not adding much—those oils can’t stand up to the sheer volume of whatever you’re making. But there’s one technique I’ve recently discovered that avoids that problem and honestly changes the game. I came across it in this Serious Eats recipe for sugo finto—an obscure but delicious pasta dish that’s a deeply aromatic vegetable Bolognese—in which the writer, Katie Leaird, ponders her use of herbs and ultimately changes her approach:

I now had a pretty good tomato sauce, but it didn’t taste particularly Tuscan; the rosemary, sage, and parsley weren’t shining through. Throughout testing I had been adding the fresh herbs to the sauce in stages: cooking sage with garlic cloves at the beginning of the process, tossing in a sprig of rosemary when adding the passata, and finishing the dish with chopped parsley at the end.

This follows the generally accepted cooking conventions: woodsy herbs stand up to longer cooking, while tender, leafy ones are used for garnishing so as not to lose their milder aroma. I decided to ditch that approach and make a garlic-herb battuto, mincing all of the herbs with garlic cloves to form a coarse paste that gets added to the soffritto before the tomatoes go into the pot. Cooking this paste of herbs and garlic gave the sauce the deep aromatic punch it was missing before.

Leaird hits on a key point here: Standard cooking instructions say not to cook leafy herbs like parsley and to simmer woodsy herbs in sauce. But this trailblazing recipe developer found that by first cooking the herbs with oil (and, in this case, soffritto), they produced more flavor. And I can indeed corroborate this recipe. Sugo finto is one of my all-time favorite pasta dishes (and my mom’s too). Leaird’s method is awesome and is now my own standard practice—the herbs are chopped and cooked in the beginning stages, and the sauce tastes much better in the end. Each little bite of vegetable Bolognese contains flecks of fresh rosemary, thyme, parsley, sage, and oregano. The dish literally becomes herbs, but in meat sauce form, because the herbs release their oils with the vegetables, vegetables you receive in each and every spoonful of pasta sauce.

The technique is wonderful, goes against most cooking conventions, and is easily adaptable for a pot of lentils, stews, soups, pizza sauce, and anything else that calls for sweating vegetables in a pan. Just mince all the herbs at the start of the sauté and cook them gently in the oil, alone or with your chopped onion, garlic, carrots, what have you. I promise, the flavor is much more thorough.

Fresh herbs are a miracle. The woodsy, citrusy scent of rosemary is a gift from the gods. The tangy grassiness of dill is a revelation. The cooling sweetness of mint is restorative. Parsley’s refreshing earthiness feels sent directly from mother earth herself. Even the much-maligned bay leaf has its place (but not the dried ones—you can definitely omit those). We only need accept the bounty and use it properly. Clearly, there’s more to be learned, but we all have to keep an open mind. Except for the poor bastards who taste soap when they eat cilantro; they’re beyond saving.