Greatest Homemade Italian Seasoning Recipe

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This Italian seasoning blend is the perfect touch to your favorite dishes! Use it in your favorite marinades, to season some oven-roasted or grilled vegetables, or to use in a pizza sauce, this amazing blend has a fantastic balance of herbs and spices with a touch of heat!

The chili flakes add a bit of heat! If you don’t want too much, feel free to reduce the amount to your liking.

Why Should I Make Homemade Italian Seasoning?

The points I’ll address here are the reasons why you should make any spice blend on your own! As soon as I started making my own blends, I instantly became obsessed, and I’ll never go back to buying store-bought blends unless absolutely necessary! Here are some reasons why you should be making this delicious Italian seasoning:

• Saves you money: Spice blends are quite expensive, and I find they’re more expensive than the individual herbs and spices. If you have all the ingredients, why spend an extra $10 or so on a small jar? I like to get my most commonly used spices in bulk, so I can bulk up the spice blend too!
• Adjust to your taste: I find that store-bought blends aren’t as strong as I would like them to be! When you make it yourself, you can add more or less of your favorite component in the blend so that it’s customized to you!
• You know what’s going in it: We don’t quite know what they put in store-bought spice blends. Many pre-made seasonings are loaded with extra salt, and that’s simply unnecessary! If you want to avoid some water retention or you’re carefully watching your salt, then you can add as much or little salt as you need. As you see, I’ve actually put no salt at all in my recipe! You can add the salt as necessary to the dish you’ll be using this seasoning in.

Tools Needed

• Mixing bowl

How to Make Homemade Italian Seasoning

It only takes two minutes to make this easy blend, so you’ll never have to purchase it at the store again! Measure out all the herbs and spices in a bowl or into a jar. Mix well and store in an airtight jar or container if mixing in a bowl. This Italian seasoning will stay fresh for 6 months if stored in a cool, dark area. Keep this in mind for all homemade spice blends!

How to Use Italian Seasoning

I’m having a hard time thinking about how you wouldn’t use this spice blend! Here are some favorite recipes I would recommend:

• Souvlaki Chicken Skewer Dinner
• Orecchiette with Spicy Italian Turkey Sausage
• Juicy California Grilled Chicken Burger

What Is in This Italian Seasoning?

This homemade Italian seasoning is a simple blend of dried Mediterranean herbs: oregano makes up the base, balanced with dried basil, thyme and rosemary, plus a little chili flakes for gentle heat. Just mix everything together on a plate or shake it in an airtight jar. Oregano and basil bring that classic pizza-and-pasta flavor, while thyme and rosemary add an earthy, woodsy depth and the chili flakes give a subtle warmth — adjust the chili up or down to taste.

Easy Add-Ins and Variations

The base blend is oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary, and chili flakes, but it's easy to tweak:

• Add a pinch of marjoram for a sweeter, mellower, more traditional Italian-herb note.
• Mix in a little garlic powder or onion powder for a savory boost.
• Stir in dried parsley for color, or add fennel seed and a little sage for a robust, pizza-shop-style blend.
• Scale the chili flakes up or down depending on how much heat you like.

How to Store Homemade Italian Seasoning

Keep your Italian seasoning in an airtight jar in a cool, dark spot away from heat and light. Dried herbs stay fragrant for months this way, so it is worth mixing up a bigger batch. Give the jar a shake before each use and label it with the date.

Italian Seasoning FAQ

Crushing, Measuring, and Waking Up the Aroma

Two small habits make a homemade blend taste noticeably better than the store-bought version. The first is crushing. Dried oregano, basil and rosemary keep their oils locked inside the leaf, so a quick grind in a mortar and pestle, or a few short pulses in a food processor, breaks them open and releases the aroma. Rosemary benefits the most, since whole dried needles stay stubbornly woody otherwise. If you have neither tool to hand, just rub the mix between your palms as you add it to the pan. The warmth does a surprising amount.

The second is quantity. A teaspoon of this blend is about right for a pot of tomato sauce, a tray of roasted vegetables, or a pound of chicken, and you can climb from there once you know how you like it. Add it early, when there is fat or liquid for it to bloom in, rather than dusting it over a finished dish. And one point of confusion worth clearing up: the chili flakes in this recipe are the same thing as red pepper flakes. The two names are used interchangeably, so whichever jar your grocery store stocks is the right one.

Recipe Tips: Dried Herbs vs Fresh Herbs, and Why You Do Not Need a Food Processor

This homemade Italian seasoning mix is built entirely on dried herbs, and that is a design decision rather than a compromise. The whole spice mix is five things — 2 tablespoons of dried oregano as the base, 1 1/2 tablespoons of dried basil, and half a tablespoon each of dried thyme, dried rosemary and chili flakes — and it takes two minutes to put together twelve servings of it. Fresh herbs cannot stand in here. Fresh basil and fresh rosemary carry water, and water in a jar of Italian herbs means clumping within days and mold not long after. Keep the fresh stuff for the end of cooking, where it belongs, and let this jar handle the beginning.

A recipe tip worth stating plainly: you do not need a food processor for this. If you do reach for one, keep it to a few short pulses, because run any longer it pulverizes the dried leaves into powder, and powder loses its aroma far faster than broken leaf does, then turns muddy rather than fragrant in a sauce. A small bowl and a spoon will do the job just as well, or you can put everything straight into the airtight container and shake. If you want the herbs finer than they come out of the jar, crush them between your palms or work them in a mortar and pestle, where you can see exactly how far you have gone and stop.