Cooking and Baking with Dried French Lavender: A Kitchen Guide
Culinary lavender has a longer history in the kitchen than most home cooks realize. French and English cooks were steeping lavender into syrups, custards, and honey by the 16th century, and it remains a signature note in herbes de Provence to this day. The variety most suited to cooking is French lavender (Lavandula angustifolia types grown in southern France), prized for a sweeter, less camphorous scent than some ornamental lavenders — which is exactly the variety in our own dried bundles, with their long stems and rich, muted purple-gray color.
How Much to Use (and How to Avoid a Soapy Flavor)
The single biggest mistake home bakers make with culinary lavender is using too much. Because the buds are so aromatic, a little goes further than it looks like it should — start with about 1 teaspoon of dried buds per cup of sugar, cream, or liquid, and let it steep rather than boiling it hard, which can pull out bitter, soapy-tasting oils. If a recipe tastes more like a bar of soap than a dessert, it's almost always an overpour, not a flaw in the flower itself.
Three Ways to Bring Lavender Into Your Kitchen
Lavender simple syrup is the easiest entry point: simmer dried buds with equal parts sugar and water for five minutes, strain, and use it in lemonade, cocktails, or drizzled over fruit. Lavender sugar is even lower effort — bury a tablespoon of buds in a jar of granulated sugar for a week and it's ready for tea, shortbread, or sprinkling on top of scones. For something more special-occasion, infuse warm cream with lavender before folding it into a custard or panna cotta base; strain the buds out before it sets so the texture stays silky rather than gritty.
Beyond the Kitchen
Our dried French lavender bundle comes as a generous 12 to 14 inch bundle, long enough to use half for cooking and keep the rest intact as a fragrant bundle for a linen drawer, a simmer pot, or a kitchen display — the same bundle can flavor your dinner and scent your pantry shelf at the same time. Because it's a whole dried bundle rather than pre-crumbled buds, you control exactly how fine you grind it, which makes it more versatile (and fresher-tasting) than the small jars of culinary lavender sold at most grocery stores.