Almond-Thyme Pesto and More Fun With California Cuisine’s Foundational Sauces

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!

For the last few weeks, I have used my blog to post articles about the foundational sauces of California Cuisine. Since California Cuisine doesn’t have an official set of foundational sauces like French Cuisine does, and I thought it should, I have chosen the following sauces: mayonnaise, vinaigrette, pesto, salsa, soy sauce, Hollandaise and tomato sauce.

I started this exploration with mayonnaise. For my first few posts, I shared such sauces as roasted red bell pepper aioli, tartar sauce, honey-pecan prawns and even recipes for a great little mayonnaise cake. It was a fun exploration. Next, I tackled vinaigrettes and shared recipes for everything from a basic vinaigrette to a really terrific chimichurri sauce that makes a delicious pairing for rich cuts of grilled meats.

At the end of last week, I introduced the next sauce in the lineup: pesto. Pesto literally means “to pound.” The most common form of pesto is made from sweet basil, parmesan cheese, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt and pepper, but this kind of “standardized” form of the sauce didn’t make it onto the scene until relatively recently. Pesto dates back to the Romans (750 B.C. or so) and involved pounding garlic, salt, cheese, herbs and olive oil together to form a paste, and sometimes nuts were included in the mash. But the rules were very loose. Most of the time, garlic was included, but lots of different kinds of nuts could be used, not just pine nuts.

Modern sweet basil pesto sauce is one of my favorites and during the summer months when there are literally piles and piles of sweet basil at the farmer’s market, I can’t resist buying bundles of it for our daily consumption, but I also make about a dozen jars of it to freeze so we can enjoy it throughout the year.

For today’s post, I am sharing what I think is a quintessentially California form of pesto: almond-thyme pesto:

California grows somewhere around 80% of the world’s almonds and is one of its four official “state nuts,” along with walnuts, pistachios and pecan. I’ll be featuring these other nuts in upcoming posts, but for today, I’m focusing on the almond.

This is such a great little sauce. The sweetness of almonds, the distinctive woodsy, herbaceous flavors and aromas of thyme and the freshness of Italian parsley combine to make a delightful sauce for pasta, fish or chicken. It takes a little patience to pull the parsley from the stems, but it’s worth it! Please make sure to use very good olive oil to make any pesto! Even with the other flavors, the sauce will suffer from off olive oil.