Monday, September 7, 2009

Pesto

I grew 7 basilico plants this summer. Pronouced ba-sili-cau. That's sweet basil. Saturday I culled the leaves and went to my mom's to make pesto. Not pest-oh. Bay-stho. My family had pesto before pesto was cool.
We used her small food processor. Some folks would shake their heads at this. Well, when you get to be a 79 year old great-grandma, you can still use your mortle and pestle. We used the food processor. We used the 's' shaped blade.
First though we washed the basilico leaves, by filling a pot with water, putting some leaves in, not too many at a time, stirring them around, lifting a handful out, shaking out the excess water, and putting them on clean kitchen towels spread out on the counter. Each time we would empty the pot of leaves we would drain the pot and wash it out with some more water, then fill again.
Then we left the leaves to dry and went shopping for a couple of hours.

When we got back, we set up the food processor and my job was to put in a few leaves at a time, pulse them, add a few more, pulse them, making sure I wasn't cutting them too much or they would be reduced to goo. At times I used a wooden spoon to push down the uncut leaves, pull up some of the cut leaves and clean off the blades. After the processor bowl was about half full, my mama added 2-3 large cloves of garlic. We like garlic. You can add too much she says, she goes by the smell of the mixture in the air. I think this is a learn by error process. I would probably be happy with the 'error' batches. Then we added 3-4 heaping tablespoons of grated pecorino romano. And then I put the lid on and she drizzled/poured extra virgin olive oil through the top hole; we would stop every 5 seconds or so and check the contents until she felt it had the right consistency. Then I spooned out the pesto into little jelly jars she had saved. We topped off the jars with more olive oil. Then we would start over with the next handful of leaves. I believe we made 7 or 8 batches. I filled 3 small jars and most of one regular sized mason jar (mine!).
This will keep 3 weeks or so, she says.
I can freeze it, she says it will change color and she doesn't like the frozen version nearly as much, but that is what I am going to do. But she says not to freeze it in the jar, so I must put it in ziplock bags.


And that is the simple way we make pesto.


notes - we use grated pecorino romano, sheep's milk, that my brother sells in his store. It is the best, I do mean best, grated cheese I have ever had. If I didn't have access to it, I would grate my own. It's that good - I prefer it to grating my own. Even the grated romano I bought at Whole Foods does not have the flavor of this cheese. I will try to find out who makes it. We have to keep it in the freezer because it has high moisture content and would spoil fast in the fridge.

-we don't put pine nuts in it. Momma likes pine nuts; I do not. My mom says that back in the days of yore pine nuts simply weren't available to buy in B'ham so she never used them. Also our family doctor and his wife never put pine nuts in their pesto, and we are following their venerable lead.

-doctor- that was Dr. Botta and his wife, who had a garden full of basilico, who would make huge batches of pesto to give as gifts, who according to my mom did use a mortar and pestle. Years ago when Mrs. Botta was too elderly to harvest her basilico anymore, she invited my mom and I to come get some to make our own pesto. I will never forget her garden. We harvested, if I recall correctly, two paper grocery bags full of basil leaves. And didn't come close to putting a visible dent in the amount of basil there.

-basilico - that's the Italian word for it. The amazing Internet tells me that the sicilian word for basil comes from the greek word for it - "basilikon", which explains the pronunciation - the stress is at the end instead of the beginning like the Italian. I would spell it basilicau phonetically.

This whole process took quite some time, but then again we were making a lot of it. It would be easy to make just a bit at a time for a treat at your home. After we settled into watching football, my mom decided to put on some fettucine and we had it with the fresh pesto, nothing else no butter just the pesto and a little of the pasta water to keep it thin enough, a touch more grated romano on top. It was incredible.