Pesto 2015

Today was the first round of 2015 pesto making. On Thursday, I picked up 2 lbs of basil at Horse Drawn Farms. Yesterday afternoon, I toasted sunflower seeds before cranking up the oven for Fridat night pizza. This morning, I stopped at Blossom for garlic (and a few other things) and this afternoon I got started making pesto.

I've been using toasted sunflower seeds for a couple years now. When the price of pine nuts skyrocketed, I experimented with a few different nut options. At this point, my favorite is sunflower seeds. Toasting them yesterday really gave me a leg up on today's pesto processing. Here I am ready to go with the first batch.

I've learned to start with the sunflower seeds (or other nut). Pine nuts are soft enough that you can add them later and still puree them into the pesto. Not so with any of the other nuts/seeds that I've tried. It works better to grind them up first.

(Note for next time. Grind up all the sunflower seeds first. After the first batch, there's too much wet residue to get this nice dry grind.)

Other than substituting sunflower seeds for nuts, my recipe is the same as before. Here's the first batch ...

Yum! Summer in a jar.

Four hours and 2 lbs of basil, 2 quarts of olive oil, 20 ounces of sunflower seeds, 10 ounces of parmesan cheese and 6 ounces of garlic later, I had 9 pints of pesto.

All set to place in the freezer ...

Well, except for one jar. We've been out of pesto for over a month now, so I put one jar in the fridge ... where it stayed for, oh, I'd say, less than 30 minutes.