As part of the Black Sheep Farms 2012 Community Supported Agriculture program, we’ve teamed up with The Grey Plume to provide recipes that use ingredients fresh from the farm. Chef Clayton Chapman and his team are happy to share some inspiration to your kitchen.
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Pesto is one of our favorite things of all time. It is such a versatile sauce. It can be used in pastas, on fish, chicken or as a spread on an appetizer or something of the sort. While traditional pesto is made with loads of basil, garlic scape pesto is pretty incredible. It can be served fresh, which is preferable, but can also be frozen to be used at a later time. If freezing, put your pesto in a double layer zip-loc bag to help protect it from freezer burn. This recipe calls for blanching the scapes, this helps takes a little bit of the raw punch out of the garlic, but if that is what you are looking for, you may omit this step. This pesto recipe should yield a couple cups of finished product and can be applied to any dish, any which way you like…enjoy!
Ingredients
garlic scapes | .5 lbs
flat leaf parsley, stems removed | .5 cups
genovese or sweet basil, whatever is available, stems removed | .25 cups
shallot or red onion, minced | .25 cups
pine nuts (optional), toasted and rough chopped | .5 cups
lancaster duet cheese or a soft parmesan, shaved on a microplane | 1 cup
extra virgin olive oil | 1 cup
meyer lemon (or regular lemons), zested and juiced | 1 ea
cayenne pepper| 1 tsp
raw honey | 1 Tb
sea or kosher salt | TT
black pepper | TT
Directions
1) Take one garlic scape and slice into 1/8” slices. Place in olive oil and heat gently on stove. Once oil starts to make small bubbles (it is reaching about 140-150 degrees), remove pot from stove. Allow garlic scape to sit in oil for as long as possible. You can even do this step a day in advance if you like. If you are prepping this the day before, make sure the oil is placed in the refrigerator until ready to assemble the pesto.
2) Heat pot of boiling water and make an ice bath. Blanch scapes in water until tender and shock in ice bath. The scapes should still have a little crunch to them when they are removed from the water. They should be in the boiling water for less than 1 minute.
3) Remove scapes from ice bath and split lengthwise down the middle. Mince the scapes into as tiny as pieces as possible.
4) Strain the single scape out of the olive oil and mince the parsley and basil. Mix the remainder of the ingredients as well as the oil, parsley and basil.
5) Season TT with salt and fresh ground black pepper.
*TT = to taste
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