Our Go-To Pesto

We love to grow basil in our garden so we can make pesto! We use it in a ton of stuff, such as our Skilletini, Bolognese sauce, easy pizza sauce, grilled cheese sandwiches, soups and so much more.

The recipe we use come from a cookbook that was given to us years ago called The Essential Pasta Cookbook. This cookbook has some great basic pasta recipes and it is one of Arturo’s go-to’s for fresh pasta.

Making Pesto is quite easy especially if you have a good food processor. We love our Cuisinart and use it for lots of different things!

As you might have seen on our stories we when we make Pesto we harvest all of our Basil and make big batches at a time. In fact, the recipe below is always doubled since I can make a double batch in the food processor.

After I make a batch of Pesto, which is 4 cups of Basil, I place it in a big bowl and move on to the next batch until I run out of basil. Then bag it up and place it in the freezer. I prefer to use quart size Ziploc bags and only fill the bag about ¾ full. To freeze just date and lay flat in the freezer.

Then when you need some Pesto for a recipe you can just pull your flat bag and break off a piece and through it in your pot! Or if you wanted to make a grilled cheese with fresh mozzarella, which is a favorite of ours, you can put your chunk of frozen pesto in the microwave for about a minute and you are ready to dress the sandwich! Super simple.

Pesto (The Essential Pasta Cookbook)

3 tablespoon pine nuts
2 cups fresh basil leaves
2 cloves of garlic peeled
½ teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan
½ cup olive oil

Start by toasting your pine nuts in a skillet until they become fragrant. Then place the pine nuts, basil, garlic, salt, and parmesan cheese in the food processor. Process it for about 20 seconds until finely chopped.

With the processor running add the olive oil in a thin steady stream until a paste is formed.

A couple of tips…

Grate your parmesan cheese in your food processor before you get started making the Pesto. Again, we make probably 4-6 batches at a time, so we use a lot of cheese. The best way to do this is to cut the wedge of parm into ½ inch chunks and place in the bowl of the processor with the blade and just turn it on and let it do it thing. It sounds loud and like it is tearing things up in there, but give it a second and it will start to “grate” the cheese into nibs, that will work great for the Pesto.

When needing to peel multiple cloves of garlic, the quickest way is to place them all in a container with a lid, and shake. You will shake the peel right off the clove!