7 Minute Easy & Affordable Pesto By Hand

If you have a blender it’s more like 17 second effortless pesto, but it honestly tastes better by hand.

A fresh, rich, and healthy pesto that is actually affordable and extremely tasty😋 Read the research below to learn the science behind each ingredient and why it was selected, or just jump to the recipe!

NOTE: I’m working on making changes to how the science section is handled, as well as the newsletter format and I think you’ll love it! Make sure you’re subscribed for some awesome upcoming improvements!

Recipe Overview

Pair the pesto sauce with some of my 3-ingredient gluten-free oat & chia homemade 20 minute pastas:

The Menu

Gluten-free, salt-free, oil-free! Fight’s disease. Vegan, WFPBnO, healthy whole food ingredients, and backed up by the latest medical and scientific health data research.

Pesto is amazing on everything and even just plain when done right. I love pesto on pasta, but it’s also amazing as a pizza dip, sauce or even a topping! so having a plant-based and oil-free version was a necessity.

Allergy Friendly – Top 8 Allergy Free

As usual with all the recipes:
no dairy, no eggs, no wheat, no nuts, no tree nuts, no shellfish, no seafood, no soy, no corn, no salt added, no oil added, no sugar added, no coconut.
Using only minimally processed or proven safe foods from scratch.

Have questions or a request to update a recipe for a specific allergy or food restriction? Contact me and I’d love to help!

• Instagram
• X
• TikTok

Nutrition Facts Table

My 3 Biggest Problems with Plant-based Pesto recipes:

• many required aqua fava; which I don’t have lying around. I also have a chickpea allergy and most suggested you use chickpea liquid.
  
• they all used either cashews or pumpkin seeds, but you would need to soak them both overnight and use a high-speed blender, plus it was like $10 worth for each!
  
• the cashews which are super expensive and would make the pesto taste strangely sweet.

All of the recipes were way too excessive of the most expensive ingredients too. Working in restaurants where your margins are razor thin makes it so you find ways to get the same taste/product but using the minimum of the most expensive ingredients.

I think of the WFPBnO chefs don’t have much or any cooking industry experience so they aren’t used to cutting costs to make it so the restaurant owners don’t fire you for wasting their money!

Through trial and error, I have weened the expensive ingredients down to the perfect balance where no flavor is compromised and you won’t have to sell a kidney just to afford it!

⭐The Full Pesto Recipe⭐

7 Minute Plant Based Pesto By Hand

Chef Rob

Pesto in 10 minutes with nothing but a knife. Alternatively, 10 seconds in a blender.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 7 minutes mins

Total Time 7 minutes mins

Course Dinner, Main Course, Sauce, Side Dish

Cuisine Italian, Roman

Servings 2 people

Calories 165 kcal

Equipment

• 1 Spice / Coffee Grinder (also you can use a blender to make it 10-second pesto)
• 1 Bowl
• 1 Knife

Ingredients

  

🥣 Pesto Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cups spinach
• ¼ cup basil
• 1 tbsp garlic minced
• 1 tbsp garlic granulated
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds raw hulled
• 1 tbsp flaxseed milled
• 2 tbsp sunflower seeds unsalted raw/toasted
• 1/32 tsp black pepper also called a smidgen (basically a tiny pinch)

💧Pesto Wet Ingredients

• 2 tbsp lemon juice squeezed, ideally
• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 4 tbsp water

Instructions

 

🔪 Pesto Directions:

• Wash and chop the spinach into fairly small pieces.
  
• Stack the leaves of basil on top of eachother then roll into a big cigar shape, pour on 1 tbsp lemon juice (so it stays green) and slice into ribbons, then roughly mince.
  
• Press on the garlic with the flat side of your knife to crush and remove it from the skin. (I also suggest Pepin’s Garlic trick/hack).

  Sprinkle powdered/granulated garlic on-top of the garlic and use the edge of your knife to mince and puree the garlic a fine as you can. (see why pro chefs use this technique to mince garlic [usually with salt])
  
• Grind pumpkin seeds, nutritional yeast, and flax to a fine powder in your spice grinder. Add the powder to your spinach and basil
  
• Pulse sunflower seeds a few times, until they look chopped–you want some larger pieces to replace the pinenuts texture we aren't using.
  
• Mix everything together, very well, in a bowl. Add it to pasta, salads, my pepperoni pizza recipe or really anything! Pesto is very versitile.
  

Keyword affordable vegan recipes, cheap vegan recipes, corn free, dairy free, easy, easy recipe, healthy, homemade, no added salt, no added sugar, no added sugars, no bake, no coconut, no gluten free, no nuts free, no oil, no shellfish free, no sos, no soy, no treenuts free, plant-based, quick recipes done fast, scratch, soy tofu free, vegan, wfpb, wfpbno, wheat free, whole food plant based

Tips for Making it Perfect

• make sure your knife is very sharp, or use scissors, when cutting your herbs.

Variations and Customizations

• Red Pepper Pesto: add finely diced bell peppers, roasted red peppers are nice, and mix well. Nice during the spring time for a pick-nik
• Sundried or Cherry Tomato Pesto: add finely diced sundried or cherry tomatoes in the summer.

🧂If you absolutely must add salt then try to add it to taste, and in small amounts and only after tasting it first. The same goes for other “less healthy” additions, but the idea should be to try to limit and eventually remove adding them, over time, when you are ready.

After a few weeks of not eating a SAD diet your tastebuds reset and you’ll notice the natural sodium in foods, check out the great article, and subscribe to, Michael Corthell on Substack.

The Tricks I Used

The question of why the recipe and substations work is important to know if you want to know how to adjust or alter the flavor to your liking.

No Oil?

We use tahini pumpkin seeds to replace the olive oil. So tahini and pumpkin seeds both add fat to the dish which will help it emulsify and become very creamy. The flax seed adds

No Cheese?

The pumpkin seeds, flax, tahini, and acids (vinegar and lemon) all help to create the flavor and illusion of parmesan cheese. The pumpkins and the flax add the “grit” and some of the fat content you would find in a good Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, the tahini adds the creamy mouthfeel, and the acids interact with them all to give a rounded and mellowed out tanginess that you get with hard aged cheeses.

No Pine Nuts?

Pine nuts are expensive and a potential allergen. Let’s find something cheaper, safer (what’s Pine Nut Syndrome?), and more obtainable. Sunflow Seeds these seeds are rarely an allergen, super common in almost every store, and super cheap!

Where’s all the Basil?

Basil is expensive, generally, so first I replaced small amounts of basil with spinach so that it still tasted the same but with less basil (basil is extremely powerful and a little goes a long way!) then I further reduced the amount of basil and even spinach while still getting the same taste and a similar yield. Food is expensive these days–shrink-flation is real!–so I want to save us much as I can while still eating healthy and tasty food.

If you want to splurge/cleanse then use 1 cup basil and 1.5 cups spinach for the maximum leafy green intake without altering the flavor.

Kitchen Hacks & Tips

I know we’re all not trained chefs, so here are some hacks even if you aren’t great in the kitchen.

1. No knife skills? Try scissors. Clean scissors are quite useful in the kitchen and are often used by professional chefs for cutting many things including fine herbs like basil.
   
2. You can use a garlic press, although I find them to be more trouble then they are worth as one section of the garlic always get lodged inside. I highly recommend Pepin’s trick, if nothing else:

Chopping & Smearing Garlic with Jacques

Mincing Garlic with Gordon

Bonus Hack: Garlic smell stuck on your hands? Use the back of a spoon like a bar of soap to rub it all over your hands. The steel in the spoon will help to remove the garlic smell from your hands!

The Science – Sources

Please tell me how it turned out! Did you: try it, like it, hate it, change it, or do something else unexpected???

If I’ve made any mistakes, or something doesn’t make sense, or if you want more/less details, please let me know in the comments.

7 Minute Easy & Affordable Pesto By Hand