Cooking with Lavender

The lavender flower, leaves and bud are all great to add to some of your favorite dishes. The flower adds color and enhances flavor.

Lavender is a member of the mint family and is close to rosemary, sage, and thyme. It is best used with fennel, oregano, rosemary, thyme, sage, and savory.  English lavender has the sweetest fragrance of all the lavenders and is the one most commonly used in cooking. When cooking with lavender the sky is the limit. If you have a favorite recipe add just a little and notice the difference.

The potency of the lavender flowers increases with drying. When cooking with dried Lavender use only 1/3 the quantity.

There are many ways in which you can us lavender such as lavender flowers add color to your salad or you can substitute lavender for rosemary in some of your bread recipes.The lavender flowers add a beautiful color to salads.  You can even add the flowers to sugar and tightly seal them in a ziploc bag for a few weeks and then add them to cakes, buns and custard instead of using regular sugar.The flowers can be put in sugar and sealed tightly for a couple of weeks then the sugar. Lavender is such a unique and very versatile herb. You can grind it in a coffee grinder or you can place it in a tea bag and make your own very tasty tea. 

When cooking with lavender, you can use the whole plant including the spikes and leaves. You can use the spikes as a skewer for placing fruits and meats or you can use the leaf as plate to shield your meat from direct heat. When doing this, it gives your meat a very unique flavor when grilling.