Pesto Genovese (Wednesday, February 2, 2011)

I discovered the wonder of fresh homemade basil pesto about two year ago and since I make it every so often when I feel like a week of garlic breath is in order.  If you don't want to talk to anyone at work, you can ignore them by popping in some headphones or looking busy.  Or...  you can have basil pesto for breakfast, lunch and dinner and you won't have to put any effort into it, cause they'll do all the ignoring for you!

I don't tend to do any measurements with things that I make often.  I think the original recipe I used when I first made pesto is from Simplyrecipes.com.  It calls for the following:

2 cups Fresh Basil Leaves (packed)
1/2 cup Parmigiano Reggiano
1/2 cup Olive Oil
1/3 cup Pine Nuts
3 cloves garlic
Salt and Pepper

Obviously as with any food, better ingredients equals a better product, but in this case that is especially true because you're eating raw ingredients and there aren't many included, which means that its tough to mask the flavor of any that are bad.  It's sometimes hard to find, but a good Parmesan cheese is awesome.  This is the kind that has little grains of salt inside that crunch on your teeth if you eat a sliver of it.  That's the good stuff, but it'll cost you!

I tend to use a lot more garlic than is called for here (to keep botherers away).  I'd say I use a full bulb most of the time, and that goes for everything I make with garlic.  If I'm using garlic, I'm using a full bulb. All you really need to do is put all of this in a food processor and press go until you have the consistency that you want.  Add more oil as needed.  This is the best way to do it if you're making a good amount.  Sometimes if I only have a few leaves of basil, I'll just use the same ingredients (less of course) and run them under my Samurai sword a few hundred times until I can form a cube on the cutting board with the pesto that maintains its shape.  If you're doing the small batch method chop it a bit before you add any oil or you'll just have a puddle of oil.  You could do this method with a large portion too but you may need a few more swords.  My bet, unless you absolutely LOVE Lord of the Rings and have a lot of swords lying around it might be a better idea to use a food processor.  The pesto will keep in the fridge for a week or more and you can freeze some too if pesto everyday for a week is just too much for you.  Put it on just about anything, usually pasta.

A bit about pestos.  Jake, most of you know him, likes to tell me that he makes things for dinner sometimes, but then when he tells me what was in it, it's pretty clear that he doesn't know what a "stir-fry" or a "pesto" is. Albeit, you can throw variations on classic recipes and still call them by their classic name, but pesto is not a catch all term for a bunch of stuff chopped really fine with olive oil.  Nor is stir-fry anything you have lying in the fridge cooked in a "frying" pan.  In fact, the classic way to produce a pesto is to grind the ingredients with a mortar and pestle.  So, some definitions.  The recipe I gave is a typical, classic pesto genovese.  If you leave out pine nuts you have a pistou (French I think).   Pesto rosso has tomatoes and almonds instead of pine nuts.  Pesto calabrese includes roasted red peppers.  However, chopping tomatoes really fine is not a pesto, that would be called diced tomatoes.  In the modern world you can of course imagine a lot of variations using other fragrant vegetables in the place of basil, and I encourage you to experiment, I probably will too, but you should notify people that you've made a cat-litter pesto or whatever it is that you used.  When I hear pesto I think "GARLIC! Oh, and...  umm BASIL!"

Thanks to Simplyrecipes, Wikipedia and Jacob "Mammalman" Basson for talking points!