Fresh Bouquet Garni (French for “garnished bouquet”) is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is boiled with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption.
Dried loose Bouquet Garni may be added to the other ingredients whilst cooking and, is of course, left in the dish.
There is no generic recipe for the blend, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaves and sometimes peppercorns. Depending on the recipe, fresh bouquet garni may include basil, burnet, celery leaves, chervil, rosemary, savory and tarragon. Sometimes, vegetables such as carrot, celery, celery root, leek, onion and parsley root, are also included in the bouquet.
Sometimes, the fresh bouquet is not bound with string, and its ingredients are filled into a small sachet, a net, or even a tea strainer instead.
Traditionally, the aromatics are bound within leek leaves, though a coffee filter or butcher twine can be used instead of leek leaves.
This Bouquet Garni blend includes the following traditional ingredients:-
Thyme
Parsley
Marjoram
Bay Leaves
History of Bouquet Garni:-
The first recorded first reference to small bundles of herbs being used and called Bouquet Garni was in 1656, when the French chef Pierre de Lune author of Le nouveau cuisinier referred the term to describe a selection of fragrant herbs including chives, thyme, cloves, chervil and parsley which he wrapped in a slice of bacon.
