Pesto is a versatile and tasty Italian paste traditionally made of basil, pine nuts, garlic, salt and hard cheese all blended with olive oil. It is not at all difficult to make and you can modify this recipe to make your own variations. While you may be most familiar with pesto as a sauce for pasta you can try it on bread, pizza, vegetables like cauliflower or steamed carrots, really the list is endless if you use your imagination. We like enough garlic in our pesto to make it spicy but you can tone it down if you want.

This recipe is naturally gluten free and vegetarian.

Watch A Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Pesto:

About the Basil

Our pesto begins with basil. We love to go to the Farmers Market and buy the good fresh basil available there much of the year. We’ll get several bunches of basil at a time and make enough pesto to freeze some. That way we have almost instant meals available all the time. There are several different kinds of basil and each has its own flavor profile. We often see sweet basil, Genovese basil, Thai basil, cinnamon basil, lemon basil and purple basil. We like to try them all and get some variety in our pesto.

When you get your basil home you will want to wash it. Dirt and sand can hide in basil easily. If you need to store it for a few days put the ends in a glass of water and cover it loosely with a plastic bag. It will maintain its freshness for a few days. We pick the leaves off our basil, put them in the food processor and discard the stems. Some people are fine with just tossing the whole sprigs in the food processor but we don’t care for the consistency of the resultant pesto.

Blend the Basil and Pine Nuts

Fill your food processor bowl with basil leaves, add the pine nuts and blitz until everything is broken up. It doesn’t have to be smooth yet, we have more to do.

Add the Garlic

Next we will add our garlic. We like a lot of garlic in our pesto so we’ll peel a whole head and put the cloves in. Sometimes we’ll get the garlic from the Farmers Market which can another entire range of flavor variables to our pesto. We’ll also add a little salt and pepper. You can adjust the quantity later so maybe just 1/2 teaspoon of each at this time. Now we want to pulse this until the garlic is incorporated into the leaves.

Emulsify the Oil

Now we are going to emulsify the oil. This is the process that allows the water molecules to combine with the oil molecules and make a nice creamy smooth sauce. We do this by adding the oil slowly while the food processor is running.

Parmesan Cheese

The last thing we want to add to our pesto is the cheese. We mostly use grated parmesan cheese for this. You can use shredded cheese as well. You can also use other hard cheeses such as romano for a different flavor.

Once you have the cheese blended into the sauce our pesto is done. You can taste for salt and pepper now and add more if you want.

Variations

There are other things you can add to this pesto before calling it done if you want. Squeezing in a little lemon juice can be nice, although we prefer to put the acid on when we plate whatever dish we are making with our pesto.

Other variations include using different nuts. Macadamia nuts are good in place of the pine nuts. Almonds, pecans, peanuts all work fine and give their own flavor to the pesto.

You can also use different leaves for a different flavor. Cilantro or parsley or even a combination of leaves.

How to Use Pesto

Now that we have our pesto we can do so many different things with it. We can put it on some freshly cooked pasta, there are some good gluten free pasta options. It is really good on a baked potato or in mashed potatoes, you can mix it with eggs for a scramble or an omelet. Pesto is also good on fish. We like it on our gluten free Cauliflower Crust Pizza!

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