Making garden pesto

Today I made pesto from some of the basil growing in my yard. The aroma from the basil and garlic was amazing and I can still smell it on my hands. This year was my first year planting garlic and I did not realize the cold winter was a necessity for huge bulbs. As a result my garlic did not get very big and I wont have cloves to plant in the ground for next year. For next year I have already ordered two types of garlic which should arrive in time for me to plant them in the fall. Even though the garlic was small it still had a strong taste and it made the pesto slightly spicy!


Instead of chopping up the basil I just used scissors. I find it is much easier to use scissors as opposed to a knife. All of these cloves came from one garlic bulb, they were a bit small but had a big taste!



I crushed up the pine nuts and garlic using a mortar and pestal...I need a bigger mortar and pestal it was a pain using this small one because I kept on pushing the pine nuts out onto the counter. I used a blender to crush everything together....someday I will have a proper food processor.


When I was done I put the sauce in mason jars and placed them in the freezer. Pesto sauce has to be frozen and it is not recommended to can and preserve them. I learned this from the "National Center for Home Food Preservation". They state that, "Herbs and oils are both low-acid and together could support the growth of the disease-causing Clostridium botulinum bacteria." Since Pesto is an uncooked sauce and is basically just basil and oil it falls into this category of extreme low-acid. Clostridium botulinum is rod shaped and produces the neurtoxin, botulinum neurotoxin types A-G. This causes flacid muscular paralysis seen in botulism and is used as the main paralytic agent in botox treatments.

Pesto sauce is recommended to be frozen and can be stored this way all winter. I have read other ideas like putting the pesto in ice cube trays and then storing the cubes in a freezer bag this way it is easy to handle when you want to defrost the pesto. I may try that next time with my other batch of basil I will cut next week and see which way I prefer.