Welcome to our second edition of Glorious Recipes! If you missed the first one and would like to learn how to make our famous risotto all’isolana, you can find the recipe here. Today, we’re going to show you how to make wild garlic pesto.
I’m excited to share this recipe with you! For a start, it’s the perfect time of year to find wild garlic. We went on a little stroll yesterday and found lots of it growing just a few minutes’ walk from our house.
Secondly, this is a really simple recipe. It has just five ingredients and requires no cooking at all.
A few notes
- You don’t need to bring a whole forest home with you, but you will need to spend a bit of time picking the wild garlic. Aim for around 30 leaves of different sizes.
- The smaller leaves are the ones with the most flavour.
- Don’t be too heavy-handed right away with the other ingredients. You will need to keep tasting and blending as you go in order to get the flavour right. Once you’ve blended a little bit of the mixture, give it a little taste to discover if you need more olive oil, salt or pepper.
- The quickest way to make the pesto is with a hand blender or food processor, but if you’re working on your upper body strength, the traditional way to make it is with a mortar and pestle.
- We made a vegan version, but if you want to add some cheese to your pesto recipe we recommend adding 3 tablespoons of pecorino cheese.
To make your own pesto, you will need:
- A hand blender or food processor
- Around 30 wild garlic leaves
- 5 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 tablespoon cashew nuts
- 1 tablespoon pine nuts
- 2 ice cubes
- Pinch of salt
- Pinch of pepper
Firstly, give your garlic a good wash in some cold water for about ten minutes. While it’s in the water, you can get the rest of your ingredients together.
Drain the garlic leaves and put them into a blender, followed by the olive oil, ice cubes, salt and pepper. Blend these ingredients together.
Add in the nuts and keep blending. We used a mix of cashew nuts and pine nuts for our recipe.
Stop your blender every 10 seconds or so to taste your mixture and check if you need more oil, salt, nuts or pepper.
Once your pesto is mixed thoroughly, it should look like this:
Put the pesto into a container or containers (we used three of these little IKEA jars) and store in the fridge. It will keep for around 10 days.
Enjoy with the pasta of your choice! If you fancy a little extra read, you can find our more about our artisan pasta on the blog, too!
Let me know how you get on with this recipe. I’ll be back with more stories soon!
A presto!
Laura
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