All Hail Kale Pesto

With apologies to Italian readers — especially those from Liguria — I would like to posit that pesto is less a recipe than a state of mind.

Have a yard? Look around it, and you’ll find something leafy to turn into pesto.

(Have a pine tree? Check if it makes edible nuts, and celebrate wildly if it does.)

Traditional pesto, or pesto alla Genovese, is made from basil, garlic, pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, olive oil and salt, ideally in a mortar and pestle (“pestle” and “pesto” share the same word origins). But a looser definition of the sauce will allow you to use up an overabundance of kale, chard, garlic scapes, carrot tops, nettles, lovage or even softer greens like spinach and mizuna.

Last year, I started too many kale sprouts — lacinato, curly kale, red Russian — and then planted them out too close, because I felt guilty when I thought about mulching the little seedlings. Soon after they’d become fully grown plants, I realized they’d become infested with aphids.

It was time to cull plants to achieve the desired spacing — reducing the stress on the plants, and allowing me to tackle the infestation on the remaining plants. But I didn’t want to waste the kale. So, after a three-step washing process that involved hosing off each leaf outside, then salt-soaking inside before a final careful rise, I made a small mountain of pesto.

To make the kale pesto, I used olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, garlic, walnuts, salt and pepper. Walnuts pair well with kale, and are much cheaper than pine nuts. I also used my food processor, rather than my mortar and pestle. I toasted the walnuts in batches, letting them cool before adding them to the food processor — this adds an extra layer of flavour to the final product.

When I was done, like any good millennial worth their seasoning, I froze the pesto in glass jars I’d hoarded in my Tupperware cupboard.

In my household, we use it for pizza, pasta and risotto, in eggs, and even as a spread on cheese sandwiches, or a drizzle over a creamy soup. Or sometimes, when snack time hits, simply spooned onto pieces of cheese while standing over a cutting board.

Here’s my adaptable, greens-aplenty recipe for non-basil pesto.

andrea’s Garden Pesto

Ingredients

• 1 large bunch kale, chard, stinging nettles or carrot tops
• 1/2 cup raw nuts, such as walnuts, pepitas, almonds or pistachios
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• fistful of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
• pinch of salt
• a few generous dashes of pepper
• squeeze of lemon (optional)

Instructions

1. Toast the nuts in a dry cast iron pan, just until you can begin to smell their toasty aroma. Take off the heat and set aside while you prepare the greens.
2. Wash and dry the greens thoroughly and prepare them — for kale and chard, this means removing the spine from each leaf. Carrot tops are good to go after washing; for stinging nettles, you’ll need to wear gloves and remove the leaves carefully from the spiky spine and cook them briefly in boiling water. (The variation for garlic scape pesto would be to omit the garlic from the recipe, remove the area that would become the garlic flower on the scape, and chop the rest roughly before blending.)
3. Roughly chop the greens and set aside.
4. Add the toasted nuts, garlic and Parmigiano-Reggiano; pulse until the nuts and garlic are fairly well-chopped.
5. Add the greens. With the food processor running on low, drizzle in the olive oil from the top until you have a relatively smooth paste — it’s okay if it’s a little chunky, and the greens have a bit of texture.
6. Add pepper and salt to taste; add a squeeze of lemon to brighten the flavour and counteract bitterness.

It’s totally fine to turn up your nose at the heathen’s pesto. Before I had a garden, I didn’t quite understand why anyone would eat anything other than the classic — basil is one of the world’s best flavours.

After I had a garden, however, I first understood why someone would want to grow kale — it has an unbeatably long growing window, and as long as your soil is half-decent (and you space the plants correctly), it basically grows itself. And then I understood why anyone would consider making kale pesto: it’s a great way to avoid food waste.

If you don’t have a garden, you can harvest stinging nettles, which emerge in the spring, until they begin to flower.

The only thing better than yard pesto (cheap greens!) is foraged pesto (free greens!).

What do you make from the greens in your garden? Heathen’s pesto or otherwise, let us know in the comments below!

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