The process of flavoring oils with other ingredients is a process that goes back well over 3,000 years. The Grecians were famed for their infusions of olive oil in particular. Today, it is a popular ingredient in Mediterranean cuisine and an elegant appetizer before a meal or when entertaining guests at home. When you infuse olive oil with various herbs and spices, you elevate the flavor of the olive oil and preserve the herb or spice.

If you have a garden like ours that occasionally over-produces, you’ll want to look at ways to preserve your herbs and spices for the long term. Making your own infused olive oil is an excellent method of preservation, and it creates a wonderful and beautiful gift to friends and family. Get started a few months in advance when your garden produce is at its peak, you’ll have the perfect personal present by the holidays.

How Does Infused Olive Oil Work?

Infused olive oil is essentially a method of flavoring olive oil with various herbs, spices, vegetables, or even fruit. It works best with aromatic produce that has plenty of volatile oils. Volatile oils give a plant its particular scent, evaporating into the air over time. This means that the flavor of the plant can be extracted or distilled into other forms. When you preserve produce with particular volatile oils in olive oil, the olive oil takes on the scent and flavor of the produce that it comes in contact with. Infused olive oil can be peppery, flowery, citrusy, sharp, or gentle depending what flavors you’re preserving.

What Do You Do With Infused Olive Oil?

Homemade Recipes

The number one way we use our infused olive oils is in our home cooking. These recipes can be as simple as pouring an infused olive oil on a plate or dish for bread dipping. Or you can get really fancy and add a dash to any recipe that calls for olive oil. Skillet dishes, soups, homemade salad dressings, the choices are endless!

Gifts for Friends and Family

Infused Olive Oils also make an incredibly personal gift for friends or family. We started infusing our own olive oils after a local friend gifted us with a bottle of rosemary infused olive oil that he had made in his kitchen. They’re a great gift for the holidays, a gathering of family or friends, or party favors at a dinner or wedding.

In a previous post about the Thomas Jefferson Cayenne Pepper, I mentioned that I’d made a bottle of cayenne pepper infused olive oil as a holiday gift for my parents. This was a particularly special gift since my father was the one who had gifted me with those seeds. It felt like the gift had come full circle.

What Kind of Garden Produce Can You Infuse in Olive Oil?

Fruits and Vegetables

Around our kitchen, spicey dishes are a must! So my absolute favorite infused olive oil recipes use hot peppers. But a lemon piccata made with infused lemon oil is really good too! Garlic is also a very popular ingredient in an infused olive oil. These fruits and vegetables really make any Italian recipe sing.

But be warned! These infusions can be extremely strong so use with care. I once (once!) tried making fried eggs with a habanero infused olive oil that we’d put up for several months. Because I used more than a teaspoon, the eggs were almost too spicy to eat! Go easy on yourself, and your diners, and only add in small drops to plain olive oil until you achieve the desired flavor.

Herbs

Herbs contain tons of volatile oils that give them their signature taste. Sure, you can use the classic Simon & Garfunkel herbs: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. But don’t stop there! Basil, oregano, dill, tarragon, lemon balm, sage, and others are amazing too!

You can even infuse olive oil with seeds from your garden. I had a ton of dill that went to seed one year. Rather than save the excess seed that I didn’t need, I decided to infuse it in olive oil instead. If you’re using seeds in this manner, you may want to pulverize them slightly with a mortar and pestle or even give them a couple pulses in a spice grinder. This allows the volatile oils contained within the seeds’ hard shells to properly open and release into the olive oil.

Should You Use Fresh or Dried Produce in Infused Olive Oil?

Dried produce is often best for olive oil infusions. Fresh produce may have tons of volatile oils that won’t have sublimated or evaporated into the air before you bottle it. However, fresh produce also contains a lot of water. If you introduce water into your olive oil, you risk creating an environment where bacteria can grow. This will create rancid oil that’s not only awful to taste, but also dangerous to eat.

Dried produce contains less water, so the danger of bacteria is less. Dried produce also allows expansion of the cell walls, inviting the olive oil in for a greater infusion.

Infused Olive Oil and Botulism

Be careful! If your olive oil is prepared improperly, you could open yourself to dangerous bacteria. Some produce is perfectly fine to pop in olive oil and go. Others needs a little more work to make sure that your infusion remains safe to eat.

Produce like hot peppers (cayenne peppers, habaneros, jalapenos, serrano peppers, etc.) have a high level of acidity. That acidity is so high that bacteria are unlikely to survive. As such, those sorts of produce don’t need extra work before they can be infused in olive oil.

Other produce, such as most herbs and garlic, are low in acidity. You need to lower that produce’s Ph level before they’re safe from bacterial growth. Even lemons don’t have a low enough Ph to be entirely safe from bacteria.

How to Acidify Your Produce

To make sure your olive oil infusions stay safe from bacteria, you need to add citric acid to lower the Ph in your at-risk produce. You may find citric acid in the canning aisle of your local grocery store, or you can do what I did and order it online. This citric acid is a more concentrated solution than what you find in lemon juice. When you soak your herbs or other at-risk produce in a citric acid solution, it raises the acidity to a point where bacteria cannot grow.

• Follow the directions on your package of citric acid, adding the necessary amounts of citric acid and water for your produce.
• Place your produce in a bowl. I like glass bowls for this process. (Do not combine copper and citric acid. Great for cleaning, bad for cooking.)
• Pour your citric acid solution over your produce so they are submerged. You may need to weigh down your produce, like herbs, so they don’t float.
• Soak your produce for 24 hours.
• After 24 hours, remove from the citric acid solution and dry them with a paper towel or cloth.
• Now you can infuse them in the oil using either of the methods below.

Methods of Infusing Olive Oil

There are two distinct methods to infuse olive oil: hot and cold. Heating your olive oil infusion is faster, but takes a little more effort. Cold infusion takes longer, but is far less work. Choose the method you’re most comfortable with.

Heat Infused Olive Oil

Maybe you have a big event coming up soon and you want an appetizer (like bread and oil) that is sure to impress. If you’re looking to get a quicker infusion, heat infusion is the way to go. Follow these steps for a sure-fire infusion.

• Pour your olive oil into the jar you intend to store it in, leaving a little room at the top. This way, you’re measuring how much oil you’ll need. The room at the top allows for the displacement volume of your chosen infusion. Note: some produce (like lemon slices) take more room than others.
• If your produce doesn’t have a high acid content on its own (like hot peppers do) you need to acidify your produce first.
• Pour the measured oil into a saucepan and add your chosen produce (acidified, if necessary).
• Heat the oil on low heat until it gets to 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) and no hotter than 180 degrees Fahrenheit (about 82 degrees Celsius). Any hotter and you’ll get an unpleasant smokiness to the oil that no one will enjoy.
• Let the oil cool off the heat then use a funnel to pour it into your desired jar (herbs and all) and store until you’re ready to use it.

Cold Infused Olive Oil

For the lazier gardener and chef (which for sure is sometimes me!) you don’t have to heat your olive oil in order to infuse it. This method takes longer (a lot longer if you like a huge amount of flavor), but it works just as well.

• If your produce doesn’t have a high acid content on its own (like hot peppers do) you need to acidify your produce first.
• Once acidified (if necessary) place your produce into the jar you intend to store it in.
• Pour olive oil over the produce until it is completely covered and close it up.
• Store the jar in a cool, dry location away from sunlight for at least 10 days, preferably more. The longer the produce remains in the olive oil, the more of the volatile oils will sublimate into the oil. This create a stronger flavor over time.

How Long Do Infused Olive Oils Last?

If prepared and stored properly, infused olive oils can last more than a year and still be safe to eat. Olive oils stored in the fridge will last longer than on the shelf, but it’s not necessary. Sealing the bottles will allow them last even longer.

Keep in mind that olive oil does get cloudy if kept in a cold environment. This occurs because the fats in the olive oil need to be kept at a room temperature in order to be soluble. Once you return the olive oil to room temperature, the cloudiness should clear.

Infused With Love

Whether you’re making your oils for gifts, for entertaining, or to keep yourself, you’re ready to infuse your own olive oil with all kinds of ingredients. Get creative and even combine produce from your garden or the local farmer’s market. Garlic and oregano? Lemon and basil? Thyme and parsley? Or go crazy and throw them all together! The choices are endless!