Pesto -- the versatile condiment

Pesto on bread (for a burger)

I got a bunch of basil at the Culver City farmer's market last week, and did the only thing I could think to do--made pesto. Now traditionally, pesto goes on pasta, and I haven't exactly had the time to make pasta from scratch, but one of the beautiful things about pesto is it's versatility. You can add ingredients or leave them out based on your preference.   It's more than just a good pasta sauce, it's a good spread on bread, is absolutely delicious mixed into rice, tossed with tomatoes, or cooked onto a piece of fish. I've also mixed pesto and balsamic vinegar to make an incredible salad dressing.  And I'm only getting started.

Some of the raw ingredients

One of the great things about pesto is that once you have the ingredients, it is fast to make.  Like 5 minutes start to finish fast.

First, toast some pine nuts. If you're into the raw food thing you can do this with raw nuts, but toasting pine nuts really brings out their flavor. Just put them in a pan (no oil necessary) over medium heat. Move them around a lot, and pay attention. Pine nuts go from golden brown and delicious to burnt in a matter of seconds.    Once they're toasted, set them aside. let them cool.

Cheese!

Next, grate some good Parmesan cheese into the bowl of your mixer.  If you're a cheese addict, use a lot. If you're not, just use a little.  The more cheese you use, the less salt you want to add. Always taste things before salting them.

Once you've got your cheese grated, add some cloves of garlic to the food processor. Whole cloves are fine. They'll get pulverized.  I'm a fan of REALLY garlicky pesto. I added something like 8  cloves.  You don't need to be as addicted to garlic as I am. Unless you are.

Next, I added the basil leaves. All the ones I had that I wasn't going to use instead of lettuce on sandwiches.   I ended up filling the bowl of my food processor about 3/4 of the way full of basil leaves. That's just as many as I had. Your batch size can vary based on the amount of basil, and the size of food processor you have.  I also dumped the pine nuts in at this point. They were cooled down.

Once all these things were in the food processor, It was time to pulverize everything. I pulsed the mixer until everything was ground up.  At this point, I tasted the mixture and added salt to my taste.

To reiterate: At this point, there's basil, Parmesan, garlic, pine nuts, and salt in the food processor. Nothing more.  And it's already delicious.





Once all that was in the food processor, and everything was ground up, it was time to add the olive oil. I don't add a ton (the whole eating healthy thing precludes eating a ton of oil).  I've seen incredibly thin, oily pesto and pesto without any oil. It all has it's uses.  The important thing is to stream the oil into the mixture while the food processor is running.  This helps the oil emulsify into the pesto, instead of sitting like an oil slick on top of it. Eventually some separation will occur. But let's start it out all blended and nice.

Pesto in rice

Pesto Burger

Taste it for salt again. Add pepper if you want (I didn't want,) and then you have pesto. It's true, it's good on pasta. Great pesto is great on pasta. This week, I've had pesto on a burger, on a salad, and mixed with rice and veggies.  Next week I might make pasta.

Pesto on salad

Butter and Jam

As we learned, I was making bread.  And a lot of the bread making process involves waiting. And I'm not always the most patient person. While I was waiting for my bread, I tried cleaning my fridge and came across a jar of my favorite cherry jam.

     
"That'd be good on bread,"  I thought.  "But wait, that surely isn't homemade.  I better make my own."  I had cherries in my fridge, so I tried to come up with a way of making good cherry jam.  All my recipes involve the use of pectin. I had no pectin.  So I experimented and googled, and thanks to the genius of David Lebovitz, I came up with this technique.  I made a few tweaks, but that's just fine.  It's not like he used an actual recipe.

Where he used lemon zest, I used both lemon and orange zest.  Where he used white sugar, I used half brown sugar and half splenda.  Would it have tasted better with sugar only? Quite possibly, but I'm working on losing weight.  I also used significantly less sugar than the "recipe" called for, and just cooked it for longer.  It was absolutely delicious. I finished mine with almond extract, not kirsch. Why?  I had almond extract in the pantry. I didn't have kirsch.

I didn't can my jam in the traditional, will keep for ages kind of way. It's delicious, so I fully anticipate using it quickly. I put it in an old jelly jar I have. It was definitely clean, but not hardcore sanitized.  If I were making the jelly to keep for ages, I'd use more proper canning techniques.

The jam turned out amazingly.  It was delicious on toast in the morning, and was also delicious over yogurt. No, I did not make my own yogurt this week. I had a little bit that needed to be used, and instead of wasting food, I used the yogurt.  I'm imagining this jam as a beautiful filling in either lemon or chocolate cake as well.   Of course that's not healthy.

Along with Jam, I made butter.  It sounds WAY harder than it is. I had some heavy cream in my refrigerator, so I threw it into the mixer with a whisk attachment.  It's just like making whipped cream, only we're WAY over-whipping the cream  I made this butter very lightly salted. I generally don't bake with salted butter since I like to control the amount of salt in my food, but on bread, I like the taste of salted butter. I made it salted, since I know exactly how much salt ended up in the butter.

I brought my cream through beautifully whipped, to chunky and overwhipped, and kept it going.  I wasn't paying attention to the mixer. I was shaping the bread loaves.  When i started hearing liquid sloshing -- ok, when liquid sloshed out of the bowl and hit me in the eye-- i turned around and looked. Here's what I had. The liquid (buttermilk), and the butter had separated. I had beautiful, dense butter clumped in the whisk.  I shaped it into a log, wrapped it in saran wrap, and refrigerated it.  It is DELICIOUS.