The Problem with Basil by Tom Motley
The night before last, the thermometer in our gardens fell to 25 degrees, in the very wee hours of Wednesday morning. That is cold, for mid-November, in Collin County. As the Tuesday afternoon temps dipped, my friend John and I were at the kitchen table, having a business meeting we had planned for some time. During our meeting, Joan of Arc (aka, wife Becca), bravely labored outside, covering the fall herbs and produce with yards and yards of frost-cloth, aka ‘row-cover.’
After any early deep-freeze event, most of the garden items come through like gang-busters, if covered properly (see Tom Motley North Texas Gardens archive articles). We’d wisely harvested all the remaining heirloom, striped-eggplant, fall cherry tomatoes, and the last of the serrano, habanero and cherry peppers the evening before, in anticipation of the cold that was coming. A good thing, too, as all those delicious items are done, for now. (This time of year, for rural folks, trusting the John Deere Ag -Weather forecast to be correct is better than doubting same).
We will employ frequent night-time frost-cloth coverings during the coming months of cold temps. French Nantes carrots, radishes, Detroit Red beets, garlic chives, French Rocket and Italian Wild arugulas, lettuce varieties, spinach, cabbages, rainbow chard, and all the splendidly hardy herbs, of course, will sustain us through most of our North Texas winter.
I had already been in the gardens Tuesday morning by 5:00, cutting items for a restaurant order. While I was harvesting wild Italian arugula, pineapple sage, rainbow chard and pak-choi cabbage (in the dark), 2 other chefs had texted me with new orders, by 6:00 A.M.! Mostly, they each wanted lots of our various basils, including Purple Ruffle, Red Rubin, African Blue, Genovese, and Purple Thai. These chefs had also heard the chilling weather forecast, and knew that their local basil source was about to be finis. I had to smile.
I’ve been educating farmers’ market customers and conscientious chefs for many years, regarding the realities of using local, seasonal, organic products. In particular, pretty much every good cook in North Texas gets somewhat complacent about the availability of tasty basil throughout the spring and summer, day in, day out, at our many Farmers Markets in Dallas, Collin, and Tarrant counties. (For example, I never showed up at any of the four area Farmers Markets I vended for years with less than six different varieties of basil).
In the midst of bounty, humans have short memories. We prater away in the kitchen, for months on end, from spring to winter, blithely preparing tons of delicious pizza, bruschetta, garden salads, garnishes and the like, all with the freshest variety of purple, red, green, variegated, sweet, herbal basils, straight out of nearby garden beds. For most of a year, the sumptuous abundance of basil practically spills over into the very kitchen itself, requiring little or no effort on our part but to reach out and pluck a heavenly aromatic handful of the stuff. Our lazy brains are lulled into forgetting that basil cannot always be with us.
The problem with basil (understand, it is only a problem for cooks who forget this lesson) is that it dies when local temps hit 40 degrees. This occurs whether or not the plant is under frost-cloth. Of course, I’m talking about basil grown in true raised beds or in-ground, authentic terroir gardens, not the stuff manufactured inside gigantic metal and glass terrariums with Terry Gilliam-looking mad arrays of pipes and pumps for delivery of artificial fertilizer and anti-fungal juices. Real basil, in real dirt, dies at forty degrees.
So I was delighted to harvest a bunch of basil for local chefs who know that good things, garden-wise, don’t last forever. Well, they don’t last all year, for sure. However, customers at farmers’ markets have assured me for years how they are able to successfully freeze my basil leaves in ice-cube trays and freezer bags and the like, thereby enjoying “fresh” basil throughout the winter.
All of that seems very fussy to us. Somehow, a leaf of thawed basil popped out of an ice-cube tray just isn’t essential. We do recommend to our customers, though, that freezing homemade pesto and other herbal sauces with the last of the fall basil, in dinner-size portions, is useful practice. That’s what we do. ‘Joan of Arc,’ herself, is a pesto nut, and even I, myself, will tolerate it agreeably atop buttery pasta on some frigid February nights.
Farming and gardening families learn to let go of greens and produce when those plants seasonally leave us. When our tomatoes are gone, and our favorite farmers’ market growers’ tomatoes are gone, we just have salads without tomatoes for a few winter months. Before long, for example, picking baby Brussels sprouts off of tall stalks that thrive especially under snow-cover, we’ll be reminded again that the earth provides special, delicious tastes all year long, each in its own, unique season of bounty.