How to Make Pesto From Kitchen Waste
When it comes to savory sauces without boiling, pesto is hard to beat. You can spread it on bread, stir with grilled vegetables, drizzle over fish, or use it as a pasta sauce. Although it is usually made with fresh basil, it can actually be made from almost any greenery, including kitchen scraps.
Heck, they don’t even have to be super green kitchen scraps. Tough, fibrous stems, grasses, and root tops are all great pesto. To check if there is any scrap that cannot be pesto processed, I took a few greenish plant parts that might otherwise end up in the compost heap.
Carrot Tops
Starting with the carrot tops, I prepared a green sauce according to the instructions in this article using the following proportions:
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 2 cups of plant materials
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup pine nuts (other nuts can be used if desired)
- 1/2 Parmesan or other salted grated cheese
- Juice of half a lemon
- Salt and pepper
First, I peeled a couple of garlic cloves and tossed them into the bowl of the food processor, pulsing them until they were chopped. Then I added the carrot feathers (including the long stems), oil and pine nuts and mixed until smooth. Then there was cheese, which I have added, until it mingled. Then I added lemon juice, salt and pepper and mixed again.
The resulting sauce was grassy, green and fresh, with all the garlic and salty flavor you would expect from pesto. It was more vegetarian than the traditional basil pesto, which in my opinion made it distinctly summer. I found it so enjoyable that I plan to never again let the salesman take the tops off my carrots.
Chard stalks
To be honest, I usually have no problem eating chard stalks — I just eat them along with the rest of the leaf — but some people like to remove them before cooking the more tender greens. I made this pesto just like the previous one and although it was quite ugly, I was very happy with the result. You can use it just like any other pesto, but I think it would be especially great as a sauce in vegetable pasta.
This pesto had a pleasant crunch and a fresh and bright, albeit slightly bitter taste. Given its crispness, I think it would be a fantastic spread for sandwiches, especially when paired with fatty cream cheeses and fatty salty meats.
Strawberry tops
As you can see, there are not many greens from a pint of strawberries, so I had to reduce the recipe a bit. Dividing everything by eight to fit 1/4 cup of tops and then mixing everything together, I am left with a very small cup of pesto sauce.
It was the most bitter pesto I have tasted, but I love bitter and eat it on a piece of crusty bread. If you really want to try this fruit-on-stem pesto, I recommend storing strawberry stems throughout the season rather than trying to make tiny batches as described above.
Pesto with cilantro
So obviously cilantro is not “waste” in the traditional sense of the word, but if there’s something I don’t know how to use until it goes bad, it’s fresh herbs. (I know you can make herbal ice cubes , but I just don’t have room in the freezer.) I just happened to have a bunch of cilantro that was starting to look like a small sketch, so including it in this review was pretty obvious choice.
The only small change I made to this pesto sauce was substituting lemon juice for lime and the result was delicious . Mixing the cilantro with butter and a little cheese softened it up a bit without hiding the herb scent. It tasted like cilantro, of course, but was much less aggressive than the pure fresh product. Do this and put on tacos to improve your life.
I could roast pesto pieces, stems, and excess herbs all day, and couldn’t wait to get my hands on a few turnip boots, cabbage ribs, and Italian parsley. Heck, I can even nest this flabby cabbage that hangs in my grocery drawer. I was going to make a salad, but now it all seems so boring.