Pesto presto

(Mom, this one's for you...but if you have tons of basil and like pesto, it's for you, too.)

What happens if you are stranded at home with this:

and this:


and maybe this?


Well, I was (except for the stranded part). And I made this:


I think it's the best pesto recipe ever, and it's so easy. There's a secret to the recipe, though -- anchovies. Believe it or no, and you'd never guess it by the taste of the finished pesto, but the anchovies lend a rich saltiness that works so well with the Parmesan.

I harvested the tops off my basil plants. As long as you cut just above a leaf node, the plant recovers just fine. In fact, I think mine have benefited from frequent cutting. They just keep producing and have not yet tried to go to seed. This is what the plants looked like after I chopped off the tops. Oh, and use a very sharp knife so you don't crush the stems.


And this is how much basil I used in this batch:

If you can't grow your own (this year, that is. No excuse for next!!), buy a bunch fresh. It should be cheap this time of year, especially at farmers markets, and very especially at the end of the day, when they're trying to unload it all.

Next, ask someone really nicely to peel you a boatload of garlic. I think I used about a cup of peeled cloves. I like to use this much garlic because it makes up a large portion of the body of the pesto. One of the reasons I do this is to cut some of the fatty richness (and guilt) of traditional pesto without compromising flavor. But using this much garlic fresh would remove the enamel from your teeth and burn the hairs from your friends' noses.

So the trick is to mellow it a tad by frying it in olive oil (which you need anyway for the pesto).

And here's where the secret weapon comes in: lots of anchovies packed in olive oil. Dump about 4 cans into a frying pan, (I say 4 because that's how much I used in this batch, but you can scale down) and add some extra olive oil (about 1/4 or 1/3 cup).

Then chop up the garlic just a little (not tiny pieces or they'll burn) and add it to the oil and anchovies.

Sautee over medium heat until the garlic is just golden.

I let it get a little more brown before I removed it from the heat.

The trick here is to just take the edge and zing off the fresh garlic, but not to caramelize it so it gets sweet.

Wash and pick the leaves of the basil, stick them in a blender and pour the hot oil/garlic/anchovy mix over it. This will wilt the leaves and make the whole mess fit better in your blender.


Blend it up a little. Then add a bunch of pine nuts (walnuts work too, but the flavor they lend is harsher. Still good, though).
And then about that much Parmesan cheese. The stuff in the green can works just fine, so don't waste your money. Good basil and garlic is more important.

Now you blend for real. You may need to add a tad more olive oil and perhaps a (as in, one) tablespoon of water to get things moving. Beware to not make your pesto a liquid, though. It should be very thick. And I don't recommend stirring the green guck with a wooden spoon while it's blending. The spoons tend to not recover well from brushes with whirling steel blades.

Blend it until it's super smooth, put in jars and freeze. The pesto is absolutely not shelf stable, so you have to either eat it, freeze it, or refrigerate it and use it soon. The reason you see so much (crappy) pesto in jars in the supermarket is because they've done something to the contents to make it stable, such as acidifying it. Check it out next time you're at the store. You'll probably see citric acid listed in the ingredients. This ruins the pesto and makes it taste sour and tangy in a bad way.

But nevermind all that bad news. The good news is that you have just made swoon-worthy pesto that would make the Godfather cry.

It's so easy being green.