should you blanch your basil?

a pesto question

I have never had any sort of connection to the concept of virgo season until these last few weeks. I came back from a long weekend camping in the Adirondacks and almost immediately spent five hours in a fugue, deep-tidying my office. I will not call it deep cleaning, because there was no dusting, or vacuuming, or scrubbing of floorboards or anything like that; it was, simply, a cleansing and organizing project, an effort to make the space fit for creation. The room wasn’t such a mess, but it was frenzied enough that I’d convinced myself it was creatively blocking me. So, again, five hours, a few of which were spent organizing my beloved file cabinet which is full of old photos and ephemera from the magic company, a slapdash and growing archive I’ve been tending and accumulating as I work on my book.

marian onstage at …. 4?

The next morning, walking into my office, I felt the immense luxury of a clean workspace like a rush of air conditioning after a long hot walk. I posted about the process on Instagram—I am back on there for some reason—and multiple people responded, like, ah yes, virgo season! It is, apparently, a time when we are all fiends for organization, an time for trapper keepers and the little labels you (I) affix to hanging folders. I have felt a gush of industriousness, and it feels wonderful.

Of course, this goes in tandem with my desire to use up my pantry, to scrounge through scraps and mine the depths of my freezer. In the last week, I have: used old (refrigerated) wine instead of red wine vinegar¹ to make pickled beets from the Saltie cookbook; finally cooked the surly pint of quinoa that had been staring at me from the back of the shelf for a year or two, and remembered how wonderful it can be tossed into a big green salad with lots of avocado; and finally, FINALLY used my Japanese curry blocks for a slapdash chicken curry. The CSA continues to supplement all this pantry-spelunking, with sizzled shishitos and wild curls of escarole and the most beautiful bunch of celery leaves—oh how I love a celery leaf! Oh, rapture!

And in the garden down the block, the basil is growing and growing, and the green tomatoes are threatening to turn red, and making me think I should buy some bread next week. I’ve never watched vegetables grow before, not this intently, aside maybe from the herbs on my mother’s porch, and every week I’m shocked by just how much basil there is, how insistently it grows. I’ve even learned how to harvest it properly, which I did this week, because I wanted to try something.

I make pesto a few times a year: sometimes with garlic scapes, sometimes with peas, sometimes with basil. And whenever I make basil pesto, in my Vitamix or the mini cuisinart food processor that I got from someone’s stoop, it always turns a muddy brownish green. It tastes fine, of course, it’s pesto, but it nags at me, that brownish tinge, that swampiness, that pesto that reminds me of all the things I could be doing more perfectly.

When I first flipped through Italian American, which I reviewed here a few years back, I paused and squinted at their pesto recipe, which asks you to blanch your herbs². Chefs Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli claim it keeeps the pesto a vibrant green. I wrote this off as a cheffy flourish—not something a civilian like me would ever try. But each time I visited our big beautiful basil bush this summer, I thought: should I? And so I did.

twirly pasta with pesto and more celery leaves

I suppose putting a pot of water on to boil isn’t the greatest effort—every morning I do it uncaffeinated—but it’s still a step. Was the step worth it? Did I care so much about appearances? I set a large salted pot to boil, and pulled out all the other things: parm, pistachios, lemon, oil, garlic. I had a cup or two of packed basil leaves, so I pulled out some of those celery leaves, too, for the sake of volume. You only have to blanch them for five or ten seconds; the annoying part, really, is that you must also set up an ice bath, and after the ice bath you must meticulously dry your herbs. A good, absorbent kitchen towel—I have flour sack towels of varying quality—makes this easier. Apparently if the herbs are watery your pesto will be brown; the experiment will fail. So anyways, I blanched, I shocked, I dried, I dried some more, I blended, and there it was, nearly a kelly green, the green of a cartoon dinosaur, green like the kale sauce pasta: a bright, verdant, nothing-close-to brown color.

More importantly, I found the taste to be cleaner. I’m not sure if the blanching also locks in some sort of flavor compound, or if it’s simply a trick my mind is playing on me. As with egg yolks, color often affects what we taste, and anyways I’ve never pretended to have the most refined palate. (In the early 2010s I attended so many coffee tastings, and always found that the coffee tasted like coffee.) But this was bright, and clean tasting, and did not make me resent the extra step which was actually three steps. Plus, I kept my pot boiling, and poached some chicken breasts, then boiled pasta, and then potatoes, in another virgo season fugue of efficiency. There were bowls all over my kitchen and living room, but soon they made their way into the sink, and the fridge is now fully stocked with things I can eat, including some pesto-licked pasta, swirling and bright.

The rest of the pesto always goes into the freezer, flattened into a ziploc; this way it won’t go bad, and I can snap off a piece easily; I do the same with tomato paste.

1. Until I wrote this footnote, I thought that this was a trick I’d learned from Molly Wizenberg. In my memory, her red wine vinaigrette recipe uses old red wine that has turned to vinegar; instead, it uses a splash of red wine to make up for crappy vinegar. I have spent a decade, then, carrying the wrong lesson from this recipe, but I am still glad for it, because I did not run out for a bottle of red wine; the vinegared wine was just fine for a fridge pickle.

2. Martha Rose Shulman has also published a blanched basil pesto recipe, here.