How To Properly Store Your Herbs, According To Aarón Sánchez

If you are any kind of chef worth your Hawaiian black lava salt, you know that dried herbs simply won't do, and that you've absolutely got to have the fresh kind. Best of all is if you can pluck them fresh from your very own kitchen garden each morning, but we can't all combine cooking skills with green thumbs, now, can we? Making regular trips to the market to buy the freshest produce every day is also a thing you can do, but it's a lot easier to find room in your schedule for this if you work for a restaurant and daily market trips are part of your job.

If you're like most home cooks, however, shopping every day is just not going to happen. Yes, you want to use nothing but the freshest of herbs for your culinary masterpieces, but there's likely going to be a few days' gap between purchasing those herbs and being able to use them all up. How many times have you opened the fridge to find those herbs all wilted? Sad, but what can you do? Chopping them up and making them into compound butter is one way to save your herbs before they go bad, but if you want to use fresh herbs in a butter-free preparation, you might prefer this helpful hint that celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez recently shared in a TikTok video.

As Sánchez says (via TikTok), "We get herbs all the time .. how you gonna make sure that they keep their vibrancy and their freshness?" He then proceeds to demonstrate exactly how he and his fellow chefs do it. You take your bunch of herbs (he uses cilantro) and trim off the bottom part of the stems and any roots that may be present. You then soak a paper towel in cold water, place the herbs on the towel, and wrap them up. 

The cilantro in Sánchez' video footage was sticking out the top, so you don't need to cover every single bit of the herbs, but make sure the middle and bottom part of the bunch is covered with the wet towel. To finish up, you simply stick the towel-wrapped herb bundle in a Ziploc-type bag, close it, then put it in the fridge. "Look how simple that was," says Sánchez. Simple, yes, but as he explains, those few seconds' worth of effort you put in will guarantee "a lot more longevity in your herbs."