Instructions

1. Mint will take a garden bed over if nobody stops it, which makes it the herb most worth owning a dehydrator for. Cut it hard and often; you are doing the bed a favour.
2. Do the cutting in the morning, after the dew has gone and before the sun has properly warmed the patch. Heat on the growing plant costs you the oils, and the oils are what ends up in the jar.
3. Rinse the stems in cold water, shake them, and spread them on a towel until no water is left sitting on the leaves. Everything you leave on is work the fan has to do first.
4. Strip every leaf off its stem and discard the stems. Mint stems are hollow, which means they hold water long after the leaves around them have gone brittle.
5. Heap the leaves on a fine mesh insert in a loose bed rather than a single flat layer, and level the heap by shaking the tray. Air needs a route through the pile, and pressing it down closes that route.
6. Dry at 40 °C for 4 hours. You will smell it before you need to test it; from the midpoint, a leaf should crumble rather than fold.
7. Cool the leaves on the tray for ten minutes. Warm mint feels drier than it is, and a hot jar mists.
8. Keep the leaf whole if it is going into tea and crumble it if it is going into cooking. A tray of fresh mint returns about a seventh of its weight.
9. Peppermint is the stronger of the two and makes the better tea; spearmint is milder and better in food. Neither changes how the load is dried.
10. Jar it, tighten the lid, and put it in the dark. Any fog on the glass a week later means the leaves were not quite there and should go back on.