Mar 252020
 

Homemade Medicinal Garlic Sauce

Text and Photography by Juliet Blankespoor

In our kitchen, we almost always have a batch of this sauce on hand. We store it in the refrigerator and pull it out as needed. It is delicious spread onto toast or bagels and topped with fresh tomatoes and chickweed. This sauce is a convenient way to add fresh garlic to dishes just before serving. Baked fish, home fries, and roasted roots are all enhanced by this tasty sauce.

  • ¼ cup (60 ml) garlic, finely minced (about 1 bulb)
  • 1 cup (240 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon (5 ml) sea salt
  • ½ cup (120 ml) nutritional yeast

Yield: 1½ cups (360 ml) You can substitute grated Parmesan cheese for the nutritional yeast if you’d prefer, and omit the salt. Mix all ingredients by hand and refrigerate. Use within one week.


Note that we recommend refrigerating the sauce. This is to reduce the chance of bacterial contamination, namely the botulism bacteria (
Clostridium botulinum). Oil infusions create an oxygen-free environment where botulism spores will thrive if given a chance, and the water contained in fresh herbs can introduce these bacterial spores. Nonetheless, some people prepare culinary oils with fresh herbs, but we caution against it because the results can be deadly. More on fresh herbs and the risk of botulism.

Meet the Green Mastermind Behind Blog Castanea:

Juliet Blankespoor

JULIET BLANKESPOOR founded the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine in 2007 and serves as the school’s primary instructor and Creative Director. She's been a professional plant-human matchmaker for close to three decades. Juliet caught the plant bug when she was nineteen and went on to earn a degree in Botany. She's owned just about every type of herbal business you can imagine: an herbal nursery, a medicinal products business, a clinical practice, and now, an herbal school.

These days, she channels her botanical obsession with her writing and photography in her online programs and here on her personal blog, Castanea. She's writing her first book: Cultivating Medicinal Herbs: Grow, Harvest, and Prepare Handcrafted Remedies from Your Home Garden. Juliet and her houseplants share a home with her family and herb books in Asheville, North Carolina.

Want to take a deeper dive into medicinal herbs and their uses?

Our 1,000-hour Herbal Immersion Program is the most comprehensive handcrafted online herbal course available, covering botany, foraging, herb cultivation, medicine making, and therapeutics.

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