Unconventional pesto for unconventional cooks: celery pesto recipe!

Here’s how this recipe was born: bought a lot of celery to make “soffritto” (for those of you who are not food maniacs, soffritto is a mixture of finely chopped onions, carrots, celery etc. sauteed in olive oil and used as a base for many Italian recipes) and didn’t want to throw away all those beautiful, fresh leaves that usually go to waste.

Saffron “The Creative” thought: “what if we make a pesto out of them?”. What is actually called pesto is not just the Ligurian recipe with basil leaves; pesto in Italian means crushed, mashed. So basically a pesto is anything you reduce to a paste or sauce and it can be made with different ingredients.

So this recipe follows the same procedure to make Ligurian pesto, but instead of you using basil we used celery leaves.

The result is a real surprise! You can personalize the recipe according to your taste: we used almonds instead of pine nuts and Parmigiano instead of Pecorino Romano, to make it more delicate (but we used a lot of it because we like the cheesy flavour).

So we won’t give you the quantities but only the ingredients, so your palate will be able to make experiments! 😉

Celery Pesto

Ingredients

Celery leaves

Parmigiano cheese

Almonds (toasted, if you prefer)

Extra Virgin olive oil (approximately a tablespoon per person, but again it’s up to your taste)

Salt

Preparation

Wash the leaves and dry them with paper towel before you use them. Put them in a blender, together with all the other ingredients. Blend until you get a thick cream.

…Voilà! Nothing fancy, but delicious and different! We usually use it as a sauce for pasta; if you make a big quantity, you can even freeze it in portioned jars and use it whenever you want.