Take Extra Precautions In Making Flavored Oils

The holidays are coming. You decide that this year you want to do something different, something more meaningful and creative in your gift-giving.

Brainstorm! You’ll make some of those delicious flavored oils that you’ve seen around in restaurants and specialty stores.

Think again. Although they seem easy enough to prepare and look great, homemade flavored oils are swimming with hidden dangers - potentially fatal botulism spores and E. coli bacteria, to name two. Commercial flavored oils go through heat treatment to kill such bacteria, but home cooks don’t generally have the equipment or expertise to wipe them out.

This is not to say that preserving herbs or vegetables in oil is never safe, but there are some crucial steps you need to follow to make sure the worst never happens.

You must work with a freshly opened jar of commercial oil, and work very quickly to get your bottled gift into a refrigerator after you add any food products that were grown in or near the ground (where E. coli and botulism live). You have about two hours; after that, foods that are submerged in unrefrigerated oil reach a dangerous bacteria level.

That two-hour time limit means two hours from the time you begin to prepare your flavored oil to the time you present the finished product. So even if you bottle your oil, you must also make sure to take into account the travel time between your refrigerator and the home of the recipient. And, of course, you must tell the recipient to keep his or her gift of oil refrigerated at all times - not just after opening.