How to cook with lavender
Most people who try it once and never again used the wrong kind, or used four times as much as they needed. Both are easy to fix.
Most people who try it once and never again used the wrong kind, or used four times as much as they needed. Both are easy to fix.
All lavender is edible in the sense that it will not hurt you. That is not the same as tasting good. The difference is camphor — the sharp, medicinal note that makes some lavender smell like a clean bathroom rather than a dessert.
English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) is low in camphor and sweet. This is the group you cook with. Lavandin (Lavandula × intermedia — Grosso, Provence, and the Super we distil for our cleaning sprays) carries far more camphor. It is wonderful in a linen spray and it will make your shortbread taste like soap.
A 10 ml bottle of lavender oil is the concentrated essence of an armful of flowers. It is not a food ingredient, no matter how small the quantity, and a single drop will overwhelm anything it lands in. If a recipe calls for lavender, it means the dried buds. Ours included — we sell the oil for pillows and pulse points, not for the mixing bowl.
The cultivar we grow for the kitchen is Melissa, an English lavender with almost no camphor at all. It is the one bakers ask for by name, which is why it is the one we bag.
This is where it usually goes wrong. Lavender is closer to a spice than a herb — think cardamom, not parsley. The quantity that looks right in the spoon is roughly three times the quantity that tastes right in the bowl.
Our rule at the farm kitchen: start with half a teaspoon of dried buds for a standard batch — a dozen shortbread, one loaf, a pint of cream, a quart of lemonade. Bruise them between your fingers first so the oils wake up. Taste before you commit; you can always add more, and you can never take it out.
Grinding changes things too. Whole buds infuse gently and can be strained out. Ground buds go everywhere and stay there, so halve the quantity again if you are putting them straight into a dry mix.
Bury a tablespoon of buds in a jar of caster sugar, seal it, and leave it a week. Sift the buds out and use the sugar anywhere — shortbread, scones, the rim of a glass. It is the most forgiving way in, because the sugar picks up the perfume without any of the texture.
Warm a cup of cream or honey until it is just steaming, never boiling. Stir in half a teaspoon of buds, take it off the heat, cover it, and leave it twenty minutes. Strain. You now have the base for ice cream, panna cotta, whipped cream, or a spoonful straight into tea.
Equal parts sugar and water, brought to a simmer with a teaspoon of buds, off the heat for fifteen minutes, then strained into a bottle. Keeps a month in the fridge. This is the one that turns into lemonade, and it is the reason we cannot keep the bags in stock in July.
Lavender also belongs in savoury food, where almost nobody expects it. A pinch in a herbes de Provence blend, rubbed into lamb or roast chicken with rosemary and thyme, is the traditional use and still the best one.
It is not a certification, so it is worth knowing what you are being told. When we call our buds culinary, we mean three things: the plants were grown without anything we would not want to eat, the flowers were harvested and dried for the kitchen rather than for fragrance, and the cultivar was chosen because it tastes good.
Craft lavender — the kind sold for wreaths, sachets and confetti — is a different product. It is often lavandin, it is sometimes treated or colour-held for appearance, and it is dried for looks rather than flavour. It is lovely in a drawer. Keep it out of the sugar.
Airtight, dark, and away from the stove. Heat and light are what drive the oils off, and a jar on a sunny windowsill will be pretty and flavourless by spring. Kept properly, buds hold their character for about a year; after that they are still safe and still smell nice, they just need more of themselves to do the same work.
Melissa buds from our own rows, on the Olympic Peninsula’s rain-shadow side, where the dry summers concentrate the oil. Four ounces is a lot of lavender — most people are still working through the bag a year later.