01 July 2025

Are fresh herbs better than dried?

Food & crime writer Orlando Murrin has recently been writing a series of Myth Busters around food, culminating in a feature in The Times this weekend (Saturday 5th July), with his latest myth to bust being that fresh herbs are better than dried. In order to clear up this conundrum he came to Steenbergs, the Sustainable Spice Company, and asked Axel for his advice...

"The direct answer to the question is that it depends which herb is being thought about, because fresh is a different beast to the dry herb. And fresh is not always the best.

Generally, It depends really on how strong the initial flavours are. So, dry bay is better and richer than fresh bay in my opinion, but fresh parsley is better than dry parsley. It’s really a matter of where they come from, so the woodier the original plant normally the better or at least better able to keep their flavours are the dried herb. So, bay is from a tree, thyme, rosemary and lavender come from woody shrubs and generally have small dry leaves. On the other hand, basil, chives, chervil and parsley are leafy herbs and are not that great when dried – basil is not the same herb dry versus fresh, there’s not the same flavours and when fresh has a sweet, herby, anise like flavour with hints of pepper but when dry you lose the more noticeable flavours and it becomes more clove like. It’s the herbaceous flavours that you tend to lose when the herbs become dried, so if the herby flavours are minimal, then dried is great but if the herby flavours are its key then fresh is better.

It’s not always that simple, though, because we use a lot of dried dill herb at home and it works very well and is not too dissimilar from fresh, because the anise flavours persist. There’s also the problem of what you mean by fresh – from your garden is different from supermarket bought, for example, where the plants have been forced to freshness, often inside rather than grown more slowly outside.

I think the better way of thinking about it is what are you doing with the herbs. So, is it something that’s essentially a fresh-to-table type meal, like, for example, a tomato salad or green leaf salad. In those cases, it’s clearly best to go as a fresh as possible, because it complements the ‘theoretical’ season of the dish. On the other hand, if you’re making a wintry British beef casserole or shepherd’s pie, then we wouldn’t have had fresh herbs for an authentic dish 100 years ago and you should cook for the season, so you should use dry herbs not fresh ones. Because we live in times of all-your-round abundance, we have forgotten that a lot of the year was a lean time when we used what was in our storecupboards and we should be more respectful of the patterns hidden beneath what we’re making and that the ingredients that go into them are really what would have gone into them, so ‘preserved’ ingredients in the winter and fresh in the summer. So, for example, if you were to make a beef ragu, the question is should it be fresh or dried rosemary? I leave that to you to decide but you’d never use fresh peppercorn, would you…."