Spinach pesto: perfect for seasoning pasta

Tasty and light dressing, how to prepare spinach and basil pesto, an easy and perfect recipe for a sauce ready in minutes!

Spinach pesto is a great idea, especially for those looking for alternative recipes to the classic Genoese pesto based only on basil. This sauce, like all those of this type, lends itself to various uses. A classic is the sauce for pasta, but you can also use it to spread on bread, bruschetta or other savory preparations as an appetizer. The preparation of this dressing is really simple and below we propose the variant that involves a short cooking of the spinach before use, let’s see now all the steps of the preparation.

Preparation of fresh spinach pesto

1. First, wash the spinach well, dry them and steam them just long enough to soften them.
2. After cooking, put the spinach in the glass of the mixer, add the pine nuts, the garlic clove deprived of the peel and the core, some basil leaves, the grated parmesan and salt.
3. Start blending by adding the olive oil. Blend intermittently to avoid overheating the sauce.
4. Work until you get a homogeneous consistency and use the pesto to taste to prepare pasta with fresh spinach pesto or to enrich croutons or bruschetta.

Alternatively, you can prepare the spinach risotto .

Some variations of the spinach pesto recipe

Then there are some small variations of this cooked spinach pesto recipe. In fact, there are those who wash them carefully and then use them directly from raw: the spinach pesto made following this procedure is much more bitter and with herbaceous notes than the one we have shown you. You can then prepare a spinach and ricotta pesto, adding about 100 g of ricotta and mixing it once you have blended the spinach.

Finally, you can also experiment with new combinations, for example using different types of dried fruit. Try the spinach and almond pesto, or walnuts, and then tell us which one is your favorite .

storage

Storage tips: the pesto with fresh spinach prepared following this recipe can be stored in the refrigerator in a glass jar covered with a drizzle of oil and closed with the lid for a few days .