How to Use Basil Pesto to Elevate Your Summer Meals

To the person who first wrote H.A.G.S. in my yearbook a lifetime ago: Thanks a lot. I’ve taken that mandate to heart ever since, dedicating myself year after year to having the greatest summer I can imagine. And with that comes a bit of anxiety: Have I crossed a single activity off my summer bucket list yet? Am I running out of time?

Perhaps many of us feel the pressure to maximize this fleeting season, to embody its spirit of spontaneity and freedom for as long as we can. Lucky for us, there are some easy ways to make the most of your summer in the kitchen, and to continue to reap the benefits into the fall and winter.

You know where this is going: It’s time to make and freeze some peak-season pesto. I like to portion out my fresh purée across an ice cube tray and pop it in the freezer (and then into zip-top bags when frozen), each little block the ideal size for a single serving of pasta cooked hastily on a busy weeknight. A basic basil pesto, like the one Florence Fabricant first published for The New York Times in 1986, is a versatile way to make almost any dish taste like summer.

Basil Pesto

View this recipe.

Double down on your H.A.G.S. intentions now by using your pesto, freshly made, in Vallery Lomas’s quiche-like heirloom tomato tart, which is topped with even more fresh basil, or Alexa Weibel’s roasted tomato tart with ricotta. And then down the road, use your freezer stash to garnish Alexa’s brothy quick white bean and celery ragout or swirl it into Kay Chun’s minestrone with kale and pasta.

But don’t limit your pesto-batching to basil. Use up whatever herbs or tender greens you’ve got, whether parsley and chives (for Kay’s chive pesto potato salad), arugula (for Martha Rose Shulman’s arugula pesto), cilantro (for Susan Spungen’s whole roasted cauliflower with pesto) or kale (for Ali Slagle’s vegan kale-pesto pasta).

The possible swaps to a more classic pesto Genovese — basil, pine nuts, garlic, grated cheese and oil — are seemingly endless. Use almonds, walnuts, pistachios or pepitas instead of pine nuts; skip the cheese in favor of more nuts, like cashews. And even as a bit of a pasta salad hater (I know, I know), I’m quite jazzed to make Andy Baraghani’s new snap-pea-studded extra-green pasta salad recipe, which includes a pesto-esque sauce that uses miso instead of Parmesan for that creamy salinity (and includes spinach in addition to basil).

Heck, your pesto needn’t even be green. With sun-dried tomatoes, tomato paste and jarred roasted red peppers, you can make Alexa’s spicy red pesto, inspired by pesto alla Siciliana, year-round.

H.A.G.P. (Have a great pesto),

Tanya

One More Thing!

Here’s a bold declaration: Pizza in America has never been better. But it’s true. Over the last couple of decades, wood-fire-oven pizzerias have “taught Americans they could ask more from a dish routinely eaten from a cardboard box — and consumed by about one in eight people on any given day,” writes my colleague Brett Anderson. He went deep on the evolution of pizza across the country, eating dozens of pies in 18 states, including a memorable one “spread with pesto made from wild garlic, basil and other herbs, foraged in a nearby forest.” Now that’s what I call having a great pesto.

There is, of course, an accompanying list: 22 of the best pizza places in the United States, for your reading and list-making and feasting. But we know one list can hardly cover all of the great pizza this country — or the world, for that matter — has to offer. So we want to hear from you. Where’s your favorite pizza joint?

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

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