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Pesto Sauces 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Medium Fresh · $12/8 oz retail · $6 wholesale
Spicy Calabrian Basil Pesto
A Genovese base spiked with Calabrian chile paste — fruity, smoky, slow-building heat. Built for the bar menu: pizza drizzle, spicy pasta, sandwiches and grazing boards.
Channel Live Oak Tap Yield 4–6 jars (8 oz) Tier Medium 🌶️🌶️🌶️ · Bar-menu
Ingredients
- 7 cups (packed) fresh basil
- 1.25 cups pine nuts or almonds, toasted
- 2 cups Parmigiano-Reggiano, finely grated
- 8 cloves garlic
- 3 tbsp Calabrian chile paste (or purple cayenne paste)
- 2 cups extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 tsp sea salt
- Juice of 1 lemon
Method
- Toast the nuts in a dry skillet 3–4 min; cool.
- Pulse garlic, nuts, Calabrian chile paste and salt to a coarse paste.
- Add basil in batches; pulse without over-heating the motor.
- Stream in the olive oil until emulsified.
- Pulse in the cheese and lemon; taste and add more chile paste for a hotter batch.
- Jar under a film of oil; refrigerate.
Why it works
Heat scales cleanly with the chile paste — hold everything else constant and adjust only the Calabrian for a mild/medium/hot line, the same one-base-many-tiers trick as the pepper jellies.
Notes
- Fresh only — refrigerate; freeze cheese-out for up to 3 months.
- Pairs with the Live Oak Tap beers; also a killer swirl into a bloody mary.
- Reuses the same Calabrian/purple-cayenne paste already stocked for the savory jams.