Pesto So Good, I Can’t Stop Eating After Dinner Is Over
Every Monday night, Bon Appétit editor in chief Adam Rapoport gives us a peek inside his brain by taking over our newsletter. He shares recipes he's been cooking, restaurants he's been eating at, and more. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
Whenever I make pesto for dinner, I end up at the kitchen sink afterwards. In theory, I’m doing the dishes, but inevitably, I nab a green-slicked noodle or two from the serving bowl. And pretty soon, what was supposed to get packed up for leftovers has disappeared.
I can’t stop eating the stuff. At least during the month of August, when farmstand basil is abundant and affordable.
Pesto genovese is only a handful of ingredients—basil, parm, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil. But how you combine them (processor, blender, or mortar and pestle), what the proportions are (kinda garlicky or really garlicky), and what the consistency is (flecks of basil or a silky purée) make all the difference.
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As a home cook who isn’t big on formal recipes—shhh...don’t tell the Test Kitchen!—I used to think that I could eyeball my way through the pesto process. But too often I would end up hitting it out of the park one day and scratching my head the next.
So Friday night I decided to call up BA’s Best Pesto recipe on my phone. I pulled the required amount of basil from our backyard garden, toasted the pine nuts just enough to release their nutty aroma, and microplaned the garlic, per Andy Baraghani’s instructions.
I like my pesto to be more of an emulsified sauce than an herby, oily concoction, in the vein of salsa verde or chimichurri. So I plugged in my Vitamix and added the ingredients in the proper order (you can’t just throw them all in there at once, apparently). Then, with the motor running, I drizzled in a steady stream of extra-virgin olive oil. Within a minute I had achieved fragrant, glossy perfection.
Honestly, I can’t recall making a better, more balanced, satisfying pesto. And when I mixed a big dollop of it with a splash of pasta water and then tossed in 16 ounces of al dente strozzapreti, well, I was in heaven. And to top it off, I served it with a tomato-watermelon salad, which proved the ideal on-plate complement.
And when it finally came time to do the dishes, I just sat there. Why bother to get up when there’s no pesto pasta left in the bowl?
Get the recipe:
BA's Best Pesto
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
