How to Make a Bouquet Garni
Just like a little bouquet of flowers can brighten your day, a Bouquet Garni can improve the outlook of all your favorite soups, stews, lentils, and beans. You don’t really need a specific Bouquet Garni recipe, but once I show you how to make one, all you need is your favorite fresh herbs, a length of kitchen twine, and your imagination.
I can’t help but imagine how using a bouquet garni first began, probably thousands of years ago. The very first cooks in the world must have been like mad scientists, trying their best to make their food as delicious as possible. Snipping off a little bit of this herb or that plant to add to the pot, to see what it would do and how it would taste. Culinary magic!
And today, a bouquet garni, which translates to “garnished bouquet” from French, is still used all around the world, mainly to add some depth of flavor to kitchen pots that stew and simmer.
The use of fresh herbs and aromatics is a salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, and completely natural way to season food. Talk about healthy! And it’s less wasteful–it puts those parsley stems to work. I can finally stop tossing them in the garbage.
This is such an easy little how-to, that I fully expect you to take off running with your own bouquet garni ideas and never revisit this recipe again, unless it’s to tell me all the fabulous things you make with your new French culinary technique.
