Ask TracyFood: Pesto is the besto 26 January 2007 12:18 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice, cooking, recipes, vegan, vegetarian , trackbackSo once upon a time, some seven or eight months ago, a fine young man of my acquaintance wrote me to ask for advice about pesto, and I was delighted to write back for paragraphs. Later I got to share at great length my recommendations about various small kitchen appliances suitable for making pesto, but that’s a subject for another entry. For now, let me just say that I would love to make kitchen, cooking, and eating advice a regular feature of TracyFood, because let me tell you (in case maybe this is your first introduction to me ever and you somehow managed to miss this fact), I have opinions to spare! I will even try to make them entertaining to read, but they’ll be more useful to you personally, gentle readers, if you write me with your requests (that’s tvancort at gmail dot com). So bring ‘em on! And now: pesto.
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Mmm, pesto. I should start by getting the bad news out of the way and say that pesto isn’t really per se good for you but fortunately can be part of many delicious things which Atkins freaks will tell you are poison (pasta, potatoes, bread, panini, pizza) but that’s all the more reason I don’t subscribe to their stupid diet. ANYWAY. The word pesto comes from the Italian word for pestle, as in mortar and pestle, which is what little old Italian ladies have used to grind together basil and garlic and nuts and oil since time immemorial, or at least until they got themselves food processors. Which brings me to my last piece of bad news: you really want a food processor or blender or some kind of chopping-type appliance to make pesto, unless you want to kick it badass little old Italian lady-style. Let me know if you want chopping appliance recommendations, but since you only asked about pesto I’m trying to stay relatively focused as I run on for PARAGRAPHS. That said, once you’ve got a toy that does your chopping and grinding for you, it’s fun and easy to experiment and make up recipes and whatnot, which is basically what I do whenever I’ve got basil that’s going sad and needs to be transformed into pesto so it’ll keep longer, but here’s my best guess:
Start by putting the basil (just the leaves, not the stems, which can be stringy and don’t have as much flavor anyway) in the chopper and grinding them up for a bit. Next, add some garlic (minced or pressed, or roasted unpeeled in a dry skillet if you want to get fancy in which case they don’t really need chopping but don’t forget to let them cool a bit before peeling) and a little (extra-virgin, preferably greenish-tinged) olive oil (a few tablespoons or a drizzle from the bottle) and chopped nuts (I like walnuts, because pine nuts, which are classic, are really expensive and give me a raging headache, but I’ve also seen recipes involving almonds and macadamia nuts, and whatever you choose, it can be nice to toast the nuts in a dry skillet or in the toaster oven if you have one, because it brings out their flavor a little, which is good if you want to use fewer nuts or just want more nutty flavor). After you add the nuts you’ll probably need another drizzle of oil or maybe a squirt of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar just to keep everything mixing together smoothly, and maybe a little salt and pepper to bring out all your flavors (I have no idea why this works, just that it does). If you like spice, try mixing in just a very little bit of cayenne pepper, too. Zippy! You can call it pesto at this point, which is also the point where you should stop if you want to freeze any of it (say, whatever you don’t think you’ll finish in a week or so). Take out whatever parts you want to freeze and put them in the freezer in the container of your choice. If you like cheese, go ahead and add grated Parmesan or Romano cheese to whatever you’re not going to freeze and give it all one last whirl (blah blah, scrape down the sides of the blender because there will be chunky bits all over the place that need more grinding, blah blah).
So that’s my basic basil pesto recipe: one bunch basil (or maybe a little less if you used some of it fresh, whatever), a clove or two of garlic (maybe three if they’re little or you aren’t a wuss), a few tablespoons of oil, a few tablespoons of nuts, a few tablespoons of grated cheese, a little lemon juice or balsamic vinegar, and a pinch of salt, pepper, and cayenne if you’re daring, all combined in a blender. More advanced techniques involve roasting the nuts and/or garlic, and maybe adding sundried tomatoes (if you don’t get the kind packed in oil, be sure to soak the tomatoes in hot water first to save your teeth and the food processor some work). Actually, sundried tomatoes ground up with oil and vinegar and garlic and nuts make a tasty pesto, too. For a more Mexican twist on pesto, try grinding up fresh cilantro, maybe with a fresh chili pepper or two. Or you could do an Asian-inspired cilantro pesto with soy sauce and chilies and garlic and maybe ginger, although that just might be getting dangerously close to fusion cuisine (horrors!) And for dessert, mint pesto is pretty delicious (but if you find a way to incorporate garlic into the recipe, I will be very impressed indeed).
With all pestos, it’s important to remember that a little goes a long way, what with the super-concentrated flavors and all (I learned to make eggs scrambled with pesto at the Glenwood, and the most important thing I learned was that too much pesto made them both both hideously green AND less than delicious). Storage tips besides the freezing mentioned above include: keep the pesto covered in a layer of olive oil, so it doesn’t get exposed to air and turn all brown and sad-looking.
Happy deliciousness,
-Tracy
Comments»
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Mmm…or, and perhaps I am committing a horrible blasphemy: just dumping aborio rice, a couple scoops of Trader Giottio’s pesto and (for the carnivours like myself) a bit of chicken and, presto (not to be confused with “pesto” but I could certainly be understanding of such an error) tasty risotto. And poo on Atkins and his ilk ruining perfectly good food because we live in a society that wants every meal to be exciting, non-caloric, easy, and unreasonably complicated for a jaded societal palette.
Responding to Tracyfood is going to be an interesting experiement for me in how confident am about my inability to proofread?
Blasphemy schmasphemy, yay instant risotto! I’d recommend waiting until the rice was almost done before stirring in the pesto myself (because it can lose a lot of its taste if cooked for too long) and maybe tossing in some green beans a few minutes before then, so that they just barely steam up.