Should i toast pine nuts for pesto

With a spatula, scrape garlic-nut mixture from the bowl into another bowl and reserve. Place the basil leaves in the food processor and, with the addition of remaining olive oil, puree until smooth. Combine basil mixture with garlic-nut mixture.

Stir in Parmesan and season to taste with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. The pesto will remain fresh, tightly covered, several days refrigerated. You may also spoon into ice cube trays and freeze them to use as desired. Looking for a specific recipe? Click here for dinnerFeed's recipe search engine; type the recipe or ingredient into the search box.

You may also e-mail me at peggy dinnerfeed. If you have access to a good farmers market that carries beautiful tufts of fragrant basil at the height of summer, definitely go for it. If you have to settle for supermarket clamshells of hydroponic herb, well, then, that's what it's going to be.

And, frankly, some of that stuff isn't bad. Basically, get the best fresh basil you can, and that's all there is to it. Without a doubt, in a sauce as simple as pesto, the ratio of ingredients is of paramount importance.

To arrive at what I think is a great ratio of ingredients in my recipe here, I dialed in the quantities during the process of testing the other components, gradually adjusting and tweaking through each successive batch until my colleagues and I agreed that I'd nailed the sweet spot.

Still, it's a matter of personal taste, so if you want your pesto with more garlic, or less cheese, just go ahead and adjust it to your own liking. The first test I wanted to do was of the olive oil. I went into this thinking this would be one of the most important factors in the final sauce. Because there are so many thousands of brands of olive oil on the market , there was no way to try all of them, so I kept it simple here to test a basic premise: Does good Ligurian olive oil matter?

To find out, I pitted a bottle of pricey Ligurian oil against a months-old jumbo tin of cheapo, all-purpose olive oil that we use in the test kitchen for everyday tasks.

I made two equal batches of pesto, with the only difference being the oil. Nearly every taster in the office there were about four or five in most cases, who, I should note, never knew which variable I was testing preferred the pesto made with the Ligurian oil—just one gravitated to the pesto with the cheaper oil.

But, while the Ligurian oil came out on top, being more buttery and rounded in flavor, we all agreed that the differences were incredibly subtle. In fact, few realized the oil was different, and many assumed I had changed the garlic or some other ingredient. Going back to the pungency of pesto, this makes some sense: When it's loaded with basil, garlic, aged cheeses, and nuts, the nuances of a good oil become much harder to taste.

That doesn't mean it makes no difference, but the differences aren't as stark as one might think. If you use an absolutely awful, rancid oil, or a very, very spicy, aggressive one, those differences will be more apparent. But as long as you're using a decent, somewhat mild olive oil, your pesto is going to be good; if you feel like using an even higher-quality, not-too-spicy oil, whether Ligurian or not, it may be subtly better.

When pesto first became popular in the United States, however, Fiore Sardo was pretty much unavailable here, so recipe writers substituted the next best available thing: Pecorino Romano. But Pecorino Romano is saltier, sharper, and tangier than Fiore Sardo. So my question was: Does it really matter? To test this, I made two batches of pesto. The first had equal parts Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Fiore Sardo, which tends to be the ratio of those two cheeses called for by most recipes I looked at.

Tasters preferred the batch with Fiore Sardo, with its ever-so-slightly sweeter, fruitier, less harsh flavor. And yet here, too, the differences were very minor.

So, once again, if you can find the Fiore Sardo, it will make a marginally better pesto sauce, but Pecorino Romano makes a darned good one, too and, frankly, Parmigiano-Reggiano alone makes a great one as well. Most recipes for pesto sauce call for pine nuts, but walnuts are not unheard of. In all the recipes I looked at, the pine nuts were tossed directly into the sauce, but I wondered whether there was any benefit to toasting them first, which would enhance their nutty flavor.

Side by side, though, the two batches I made were nearly indistinguishable from each other: Not one taster could tell the difference. Because I had made them and knew what flavor I was looking for, I could faintly detect the roasted-nut flavor in the lingering aftertaste of the sauce, and I honestly didn't think it did the sauce any favors—it detracted from the sweet roundness that makes a good pesto taste good.

The verdict: Toasting is not worth it. In a couple of recipes, including Marcella Hazan's in The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking , a small amount of butter is worked into the pesto in addition to the olive oil. I made a batch with butter, but no one could figure out if or how it was different. It may marginally help to bind and emulsify the sauce when you toss it with pasta, but it turned out to not be an essential addition.

Because pesto is such a strong sauce, anything you do to reduce its pungency just a little and steer it toward a sweeter, rounder-flavored sauce will help. That includes selecting a good, mild olive oil; using Pecorino Sardo cheese instead of Romano; and not toasting the pine nuts. At first it will be pretty chunky, with bits of unincorporated nuts and garlic, and stringy pieces of basil leaves.

Continue to pulse and blend, and you will see your texture growing less chunky and more smooth. If you are having trouble getting things to blend evenly, you can add a spoonful or two of water or oil to help smooth things out.

Stop when your pesto is your preferred texture. Some people like to leave it a little chunky, with discrete pieces of leaves, but I prefer a smoother texture, closer to a sauce.

Finally, add your grated Parmesan cheese, and pulse the processor again until the cheese is entirely mixed in. The Parmesan cheese adds quite a bit of salt, so you many not even need to add any to suit your taste. Your pesto sauce is now finished!

My favorite way to enjoy this is simply tossed with hot pasta—try sprinkling some extra Parmesan and pine nuts on top of the pasta for an extra flavor boost. This pesto sauce is also incredible as a dipping sauce, a sandwich spread, or a chicken marinade. You can use it anytime you want to add the fresh taste of summer to your meals.

All text and images copyright Elizabeth LaBau. They're crazy-expensive! Sure, there's a lot to love about pine nuts So buttery! So creamy! That's not saying you can never use pine nuts, of course, but with so many other tasty nuts, why not mix things up?

Kale is great with almonds, and sweet pecans would be a fine match for spicy arugula. Just because pesto is technically a no-cook sauce doesn't mean you're off the hook entirely. For a truly dynamo pesto with tons of flavor, you must must!

Cool them completely before processing, or they'll turn into a gummy paste. The fastest way to whip up a pesto is in a food processor, but that doesn't mean you can just dump everything in and start mixing. Saffitz explains that this lazy method will result in a concrete-like, oily paste. The tender greens get bruised and banged-up, and the nuts release too many oils, turning to nut butter rather than a pleasantly chunky sauce.