Make It Happen

Laura Avery
Mirror contributing writer
  
   Food processing got scary when it got all gadgety. Think of the early days, when folks simply roasted, boiled, cut and mashed their food. Then along came the mortar and pestle, and herbs could be crushed — even creamed — to release their flavor essences. Voila — toppings and sauces.
   Hand-operated mechanical beaters gave rise to blenders and mixers, then the first Cuisinart appeared on the market, and unless you had one of these gadgets, you weren’t a serious cook. But was the average home cook seriously expected to own, let alone know how to operate, a dough hook, a paddle attachment and an assortment of lethal slicing apparati, all whizzing at super-visual speed?
   Fortunately, home cooking has recently come back down to earth. Cuisinarts can now be had for under $100, everyone is watching cooking shows, and more and more people are shopping at their local farmers’ market. One of the simplest, most delicious and fool-proof things anyone can make at home with a fancy appliance or a simple mortar and pestle, is pungent, delicious pesto.
   Cynthia Bronte, owner and chief recipe tester for Pesto Perfectto, has been experimenting with different pesto recipes for six years. Cynthia, born in the U.S. to Sicilian parents, began growing basil, the primary ingredient for pesto, in a greenhouse in San Diego County as a sideline to her nursery business. Basil plants are intensely flavored and tender, and simply turn black and die at the first hard frost.
   It is a coveted seasonal treasure, and is best-known as the perfect complement to tomatoes in any dish imaginable. Under ideal growing conditions, it is a prolific and giving plant as well, and it thrives in a greenhouse environment. Cynthia further experimented with growing her basil plants hydroponically, a method in which plants are grown in a perlite or sand medium irrigated by nutrient-rich water. Plants that are grown indoors under these conditions are extremely tender and sweet, because they do not pick up the strong mineral taste that plants grown outdoors absorb from the soil.
   The name “pesto” is taken from pestle, the implement that was first used to crush fragrant basil leaves with garlic in the first step in pesto making. Pesto’s other basic ingredients are olive oil, parmesan cheese, pine nuts and a little salt. The flavors blend into a sinfully rich, creamy sauce that is best simply ladled onto hot pasta. But here Cynthia began to venture into uncharted areas with her abundance of basil, and today Cynthia’s business, Basiltops, features a dozen specialized pesto recipes, all available to taste and buy at several California farmers’ maarkets.
   Like many another small business that began with an idea and a home kitchen, Basiltops has become a small industry. Cynthia remembers the day she decided to buy her first 20-quart Hobart mixer, a giant tabletop thing that was soon replaced with a floor model behemoth of a size unimaginable just months before.
   Cynthia spent most of her time outside the greenhouse processing vats of pesto for her customers. She packaged the finished product in ziploc bags that became messy when opened, but soon to everyone’s relief Basiltops came up with an ingenious resealable spout that made single servings of pesto positively drip-free. Cynthia and her partner made the rounds at the Santa Monica Wednesday market — first once a month, then every other week, then weekly.
   Basiltops began to bring out more new products - low fat pesto made with lime juice in place of olive oil, a sun dried tomato pesto, and a “pestomole” which incorporated avocados into the basil mix. As a topping, Basiltops’ pestos had increasingly creative uses. Cynthia continued to share recipes that she had compiled and received from customers for pesto in potato salad, as a topping for baked fish, and as a vegetable dip.
   Because Basiltops pesto contains ingredients that Cynthia herself does not grow, the product must be placed in the “non-agricultural” section of California Certified Farmers’ Markets, which adhere to a strict “growers only” policy. Farmers like Cynthia feel that simply processed, value-added agricultural products are good for farmers and good for the markets and customers they serve.
   Recently the trend at farmers’ markets has been to allow more and more processed products into the certified agricultural section, a practice that is undergoing review by a state advisory committee on farmers’ market issues.
   Tender, greenhouse grown basil is a wonderful product that can be made into a number of tantalizing pesto mixtures, as Cynthia has shown. Home cooks should all try to make a batch of this classic sauce at least once, whether they have a state of the art food processor or a simple mortar and pestle. Then they can come on back to the farmers’ market and compare recipes with a true Sicilian pesto maker at the Basiltops stand. A great pesto dish can make anyone feel like a pro.