Confit Garlic Scape Pesto
This pesto great way to stockpile on flavour. Get your garlic stem from farmers market. This is a great recipe that stores and freezes well. Make a batch, they make great gifts for your food loving friends.
There are many garlic pesto recipes on the net. But nothing definitive. Google is not always your best friend. I was trying to find a ‘good’ and definitive recipe for a pesto with garlic scape. And it yielded the all too similar methods and ingredients. I guess you can’t always find what you want in the internet universe.
I had to follow my ‘muse’. The stems are full of flavor but too fibrous. So I confit the hard stems and use the oil to make the pesto. And pureed the softer bits for the pesto.
Confit Garlic Scape Pesto
This pesto great way to stockpile on flavour. Get your garlic stem from farmers market. This is a great recipe that stores and freezes well. Make a batch, they make great gifts for your food loving friends.
Author: WiseMonkey
Recipe type: Condiment
Cuisine: Fusion
Ingredients
For the confit oil
- 450 gr Garlic Scape(use only the hard stems and tips)
- 500 ml Extra Virgin Olive Oil (enough to cover the stems and tips)
- 2 ea Star Anise
- 2′ inch cinnamon
For the Garlic Scape Pesto
- Remaining Garlic Scape
- optional – Fresh herbs like basil, rosemary, thyme, flat leaf parsley
- 200 gr pine nut roasted
- garlic scape oil
- salt to taste
Instructions
Make the confit oil
- Make confit by combining all the ingredients above into a pot and cover with aluminium foil and leave in oven at 225 for 2 hours. Remove and let it cool down, covered if possible(you could fresh herbs at this point to infuse more flavours).
- Strain, keep oil and discard everything else. Use this oil for the garlic scape pesto.
- Alternately, this oil would be great for finishing dishes and used in place of olive oil etc.
Make the Pesto
- In a vita-prep, cuisinart or food processor grind the roasted pine nuts. remove and keep aside
- blend the garlic scape. the scapes are fibrous, may take a couple of minutes or longer to break it down.
- add the fresh herb and blend till fine.
- add the pine nut and blend everything together.
- slowly drizzle the garlic scape oil into the mixture. add slowly in the beginning.
- -taste and season accordingly.
Notes
I omitted the cheese as I can always add that later if the recipe required it. Garlic scape is used instead of garlic. This pesto will store well in a mason jar /or frozen.
