We’ve gotten used to Pesto from a Bottle. Which is basically textureless, overly-preserved, old-man-scalp oily green pooh.

Exactly.

Why not make your own? It’s relatively quick, it gives great wrist/hand exercise (other than the usual way) and it tastes better than any pesto sauce you’ve ever had in your life…unless you happen to have 20 Italian grandmama’s chained to cutting boards in your basement…which would be strange.

Ok, onto preparation.

1) Put away your blender, your food processor, your hand mixer, and anything battery operated set aside for now.

2) Sharpen your best veggie knife. When cutting fresh young Basil leaves we don’t want to mush them apart, we want crisp clean lines of separation.

3) Have some wine. Nothing gets you in the mood to make Pesto (and then eat it) more than a good chilled white wine.

4) Gather your ingredients:

- Minimum 2 handfuls of fresh, young Basil leaves

- half a cup of parmesan, reggiano or romano chunked up and cut

- a handful of roasted pinenuts

- 3-5 cloves of fresh roasted garlic

- extra virgin olive oil

- salt & pepper

* finely chop a dried chile for a bit of color & spice

Here is where idiots tell you to ” gently pulse the ingredients” in your food processor and then won’t shutup about how good their pooh-ey pesto is everytime your wife makes you accompany her to their knic-knac-y suburban house where they serve you wine from a box in plastic glasses and have microwave quiche for snacks.

No man, woman, don’t do it. Get your knife and just start chopping. Put on a record or the 8-track, open the curtains and let some daylight in, slow down and enjoy this. Now, going for the basil is the natural first step but it really doesn’t matter, as long as you keep all your ingredients in separate bowls till you’re ready to mix. The only rule is to intermingle your chops so as to not have an uneven balance of say, pinenuts to basil. Too many pinenuts can overpower the crisp freshness of basil, which should be complemented by their chewy texture rather than take over your palate. Same with the garlic and the cheese, both of which are meant to be mere accompaniment to the sublimity of the Green Leaf.

So, let mix the basil, garlic, pinenuts adding pinches of sea-salt and fresh milled pepper. As with all of our ingredients, the better quality, the better taste, which brings us to our olive oil. Most Pestos simply have too much olive oil in them. People fear “emulsion”, afraid that they are going to screw up adding the oil, which only brings us back to the fact that we are not using machines for this other than your non-robot arm. What…did the ancient Genoveses rig their donkeys to a pulley system and hang their vats of olive oils from wooden cranes in order to properly emulsify their sauces? Probably while torturing some poor foreigners, but that’s beside the point. I’m not a Luddite, but Screw the Robot Arm which quashed the flavor from our beloved sauces–Screw it!

Just add enough oil to cover our robust heap of Basil goodness, and then one more drop for good measure.You will want to use this within an hour or two as the flavors will really begin to coalesce into peak eatability quite quickly. For best results, just before adding to your pasta (in my case I used this with Somen, which are extremely thin angelhair-esque Japanese noodles, and I have eaten this with Soba before as well–Amazing) you should stir or emulsify or whatever the hell the oil that has been marinading our fine chunk cakelike chop into the rest of the mixture. Now eat. If it were up to me I might be crazy enough to add a few fresh chilis to the mixture as well, that or maybe an pestled anchovy or two…you know, just for fun.

This is great for summer and cool white wines with a leggy blonde in something flimsy on the veranda and oh-so perfect for naked post-coital spread on toast or whathaveyou in the predawn kitchen as the sky turns a pale blue at the edges and you stare out into the sea and imagine how many times your Italian ancestors have done just this exact thing. Prego.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:57. It is filed under Mediterranean and tagged with Basil, Basilico, Fusion, Genovese, Pesto, Pizza!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.