Pesto Day

We usually have a pesto making day a few times a summer. Early July, late August, and, if we're lucky, late September--however long it takes the basil plants to grow back every time we snip them down to their lowest few branches.

Mama--my nursemaid and companion after surgery--was nice enough to harvest the basil today, while I prepped everything inside for pesto making.

There's a recipe below, but I don't truly believe in pesto recipes. They're only ever there to give you a sense of what goes into a good pesto in general proportions. Because a pesto's ingredients are so few, how each ingredient tastes (and how those tastes vary widely between kinds of basil or garlic or types of olive oil or parmesan cheese) can change the pesto's final flavor drastically.

So, the recipe below is the basic, no fail recipe that will get you to a good balanced flavor, but then you should expect to add ingredients in small amounts to get to the flavor that you most prefer.

The two most important ingredients are basil (as fresh as humanly possible--right from the garden is best. Once basil leaves have been off the plant for more than 2-3 days, the flavor diminishes significantly and they should be discarded.)


And garlic. The garlic should be as fresh as possible as well. Older garlic tends to mellow, and since pesto is made to go on hot pasta, the heat of its final destination will mellow the garlic flavor a little. And I like my pesto to have some bite. Mama brought me fresh dug garlic from the farm in Cincinnati. . . lucky me.


And the garlic was soooooo pretty. I loved the purple inner papers.


Summer Pesto Recipe (makes 5 1/2-cup servings of pesto--or enough pesto for five pesto dinners for four people per dinner):

1 c. parmesan cheese (roughly chopped from a big block. get good cheese. it makes a difference.)
1 c. pinenuts
7 garlic cloves (or a whole medium sized head of garlic, peeled and smashed with the flat of your chef's knife)
8 c. basil leaves (preferrably sweet Italian basil)
3/4 c. + 1 T. olive oil (some people really care about the kind they use, but whatever flavor it could impart is pretty overwhelmed by the garlic and basil)
1/2 t. salt
5 turns of pepper grinder
1 t. honey (optional)

I suggest tasting as you go, so that you can get a sense of how each ingredient affects the flavor. But I usually put it together in this order: In a large food processor, pulse together the pine nuts, parmesan, and garlic until they look like cheaper parmesan shake-cheese you can still get at the grocery.

Then add basil with olive oil--you may have to do this addition in a few batches because the flat leaves take up a bunch of space. . . but hardly any once pulsed. So add a handful of leaves and some of the olive oil, pulse, repeat.

Definitely taste it at this point. If there's no bite from the garlic, you need to add more. If there's no nutty flavor, you will need to add more pinenuts. Then add the salt, pepper, and honey.

Honey is not a traditional ingredient of pesto and its purpose is not to make the pesto taste sweet. Both honey and molasses--much like salt--are excellent for making a thing taste rounder and more fully like itself. Trust me. Maybe make the pesto without honey, but then add a short drizzle to one half cup of it, mix it up and see whether you prefer it with or without.

We immediately put this pesto into small 1/2-cup tupperware containers and freeze them. I don't honestly know how long its advisable to keep them once frozen. But we have certainly thawed them out in early March the following year and found it to be just as good and tasty as it was the previous summer. And man, in the winter doldrums of early March in Chicago, nothing is better than eating food that tastes so green and homegrown to chase the blues away.