Video: Blanched Basil Pesto

Blanched Basil Pesto

Blanched basil pesto uses five simple ingredients like basil and garlic to great effect. Make blanched basil pesto with help from a Los Angeles-based personal chef in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Jamie Levine from chefjamielevine.com, and today I'm going to show you how to make blanched basil pesto. So pesto super simple. It's just five ingredients. We have our basil, we have Parmesan, some garlic, and olive oil. And then a little bit of pine nuts. And basically the reason why we are going to blanch the basil leaves is because you get this really gorgeous bright green color that you wouldn't get from just leaving them raw. And in order to blanch basil you just get a pot of boiling salted water. You are going to drop the leaves in off their stems of course for about 45 seconds. And then you are going to shock them into a bowl of ice water. Drain them, squeeze out all the excess water. Give them a fine chop and that's what I have here. So basically super simple from here. Everything is going to go into a food processor. And I'm just going to drop in my pine nuts, the garlic and olive oil, Parmesan. It's already shredded. And you just want to kind of do equal amounts of each about two tablespoons of each. And you can always adjust from there but this is one bunch of basil, one large bunch. And like I said you want to give it a good chop because you don't want to leave them whole because the food processor kind of has a hard time chopping them. And it just gives it a head start and makes everything just more evenly. Here we go we give it a good pulse just a few times. You could see from here I'm going to still dry. You want this to be a little wetter so I'm going to add olive oil. Just enough so you can see that it's going to be able to be a spoon-able type of liquid. And some people prefer their pesto smoother. I like mine with a little bit of texture. That is perfect to me. You can always adjust it with a little more, a little more liquid if you want. And also adjust your seasoning salt and pepper. But this looks really good to me. And see how it's bright green. That's exactly what you are going for. That's it. I'm chef Jamie Levine, and thank you for watching.

Blanched Basil Pesto

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