Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto
During the lockdown, I did what everyone else did: Went through all my kitchen cabinets, cleaning them out, and finding little bits and bags and jars of stuff that I should have used a long time ago, but didn’t.
You did do that – right?
Mine was quite a purge. I’ve had so many things from travels, friends, food companies, houseguests, strangers, etc. that my drawers and cabinets were out-of-control. I posted some pictures on social media of the things that I appeared to be running low on, but that I was anxious to use up, and people, kindly, offered to send me more…which would have negated the whole idea of the purge. The time had come to use things up.
One thing I found that I had a lot of sun-dried tomatoes. I stocked up in Italy (I think?) and had a few jars from testing the Sun-dried Tomato, Bacon, and Cornmeal Madeleines for the apéro snack chapter in Drinking French. As a California restaurant cook in the 80s and 90s, I’ve seen more than my share of sun-dried tomatoes.
Fast-forward to today, and I was once again faced with an overload of what we used to call, in restaurant lingo, SDTs. Not to be confused with STDs. (Although things were pretty rowdy in those days and I’m pretty sure those were a subject of discussion in some of the kitchens I worked in too.)
The great thing about this sun-dried tomato pesto is that you can make it any time of the year and you can tweak it by adding a handful of basil in place of the rosemary. The recipe makes a little more than you’ll need probably for one meal or appetizer, but it keeps in the refrigerator for at least a week or so, and is great when you’re craving full-on tomato flavor and it’s not quite tomato season. It’s versatile enough to be tossed in pasta, smeared on pizza before baking or on flatbread after baking, spread on toasts as an appetizer with bits of goat cheese crumbled on top, alongside grilled fish, meat, or vegetables, as a spread on a sandwich or burger (in place of ketchup), or even snuck in the middle of a grilled cheese sandwich.
Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto
- 2 cups (220g, 8 ounces - drained weight) sun-dried tomatoes, packed in olive oil
- 3/4 to 1 cup (180-250ml) olive oil from the sun-dried tomatoes, with additional extra-virgin oil olive to get the amount needed
- 1/2 cup (50g) toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
- 1/2 cup (45g) grated Parmesan cheese
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
- 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves
- pinch red pepper flakes
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
- freshly-squeezed lemon juice
- Coarsely chop the sun-dried tomatos and put them in the bowl of a food processor. Add 3/4 cup (180ml) of the oil, chopped walnuts, Parmesan, garlic, rosemary, red pepper flakes, salt, and a few drops of lemon juice.
- Pulse in the food processor until it's a cohesive paste. Taste and add some or all of the remaining 1/4 cup (60ml) oil, additional salt, chopped rosemary, or lemon juice, if desired.
Notes
