Making my own flavoured olive oil was inspired by my friend Jess. I went to her place for dinner and she had made her own infused garlic oil, made with garlic her dad had grown and the flavour was delicious. Paulie and I always have a drizzle over our salads, pizza and pasta and we spend a small fortune on flavoured olive oils so I thought I would give it a go. I read endless articles on the best process as I wanted my oil to last longer than a week without going cloudy. The best one I found was to dry the herbs in the microwave as moisture cause bacteria and makes the oil go cloudy and yuk. You can flavour your oil with anything that is dry, fennel seeds, cumin, pepper etc. We chose rosemary as our ‘wet’ herb and dried chillies as our dried flavour. It was so easy that we are going to try different flavour combinations and we will definitely be replacing the purchased oils with our own once we have used them up!

Ingredients

• 1 litre extra virgin olive oil
• good handful rosemary
• 4 dried chillies
• 3 tbsp chilli flakes

Method

Rosemary Oil

1. Double over 2 pieces of kitchen towel and pick the leaves off all your rosemary except for a few whole sprigs to use for decoration.
2. Place another double sided piece of kitchen roll on top of the leaves and microwave on full power for 30 seconds feel the sprigs if not yet dried reheat in 10 sec bursts until dry. Repeat with the whole sprigs
3. Fill your sterillised bottle with the leaves and sprigs and fill with olive oil.

Chilli Oil

1. Fill the bottom of a sterillised jar with the chilli flakes
2. Add the wholes dried chilli’s for decoration
3. Fill bottle with olive oil

Leave both oil’s to infuse for at least a week