Simple Basil Pesto Recipe – Quick and Easy 5 Ingredients

Come join us in the backyard as we harvest fresh and delicious basil for homemade pesto. This is a simple, quick and easy 5 ingredient basil pesto recipe you’ll want to try to store all your basil. It’s like having summer in a jar!

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BIG BATCH RECIPE – MADE IN VIDEO
8 cups fresh basil leaves
8 cloves garlic
1 cup nuts (pine nuts, walnuts, or almonds)
2 cups freshly grated parmesan
2 cups extra virgin olive oil
*salt & pepper and lemon to taste

SMALL BATCH RECIPE – 1/4th RECIPE
2 cups fresh basil leaves
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup nuts (pine nuts, walnuts, or almonds)
1/2 cups freshly grated parmesan
1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil
*salt & pepper and lemon to taste

RECIPE STEPS
1 – BLEND: Into a food processor, toss in the basil, garlic, and nuts. Add parmesan, then drizzle in olive oil while blending. You may need to do this in batches if your food processor is smaller. In just a few spins, you’ll have vibrant, creamy pesto.

2 – TASTE: Give it a taste. Add salt, pepper, or a squeeze of lemon juice to brighten it up. This recipe makes a LOT of pesto, so feel free to portion it and season each batch to your taste.

3 – STORE: This 8 cup basil batch makes about 4 cups of pesto—perfect for freezing in jars, ice cube trays, or topping pasta, veggies, sandwiches, and more. It’s summer in a jar, ready anytime!

To watch our 2025 Garlic Harvest video mentioned in the video click here! https://youtu.be/nlV3Jt8PPsM

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#garden #gardening #growyourownfood #urbanhomesteading #homesteading #pesto #basil #recipe

Why are you buying pesto at the store? Make it yourself. [Music] Today we are going to make a extremely easy 8 cup basil pesto recipe today fresh from the garden. So let’s get started. All right. So first off, we need to come in here. Look at these glorious basil plants. All right. Like I said, this is going to be an 8 cup basil pesto. So, we’re going to come in here. We’re going to go pretty aggressive. We really got to cut this back. And these are woody stems. Going to come in here. We already uh Tanya already trimmed this back once. So, we’re going to go we’re going to go ham on it. [Music] Yeah, we’re going to get eight cups off of one plant. [Music] Okay, well, we only got to one bush and we’re probably over eight cups at this point. So, uh we’re just going to stop. So, let’s go ahead and get started with the recipe. So, let’s get into the recipe. We’ll put it up on the screen for us here, but this recipe, uh, I quadrupled it. And so, the total recipe is going to be eight cups of basil, whatever variety you prefer. Then, we’re going to have eight cloves of garlic, freshly harvested from the garden. I’ll put Tanya’s most recent garlic reveal video down in the description below. So, again, eight cups of basil Garlic, homegrown or storebought is fine. We have one cup of nuts here. And you can do traditional classic pine nuts if you want. I’m going with half and half. Uh it’s going to be one cup of walnuts and pecans. I’m going to do that. Pecans or pecans, whichever you prefer. So, one cup of nuts. Then we’re going to do two cups of parmesan. And then we’re going to do two cups of olive oil. All right, let’s go. So, now I need to measure out 8 cups of basil. And just kind of a tidbit here, we try to always be as organic as possible in everything that we purchase. So obviously number one, all of our basil has never been sprayed. Se dusted with seven any type of pesticides, herbicides whatsoever. So we practice that at home in our gardening techniques. Um and then all the way down to um our garlic. We harvested our own garlic uh completely organic. And then our parmesan cheese, organic if you can. And the nuts, always buying that organic as well. and olive oil here. Also, USDA organic. So, that’s one cup. I am not washing this. I am kind of looking at it just to see if there’s any spider cocoons under the leaves. This is really clean. My lovely assistant daughter is showing how clean that is. Beautiful, lush basil. And for dry measure, I’m putting all the basil in here. I’m kind of just shoving it in. Um I’m not chopping it up and then measuring it or anything like that. So, we do have some stems in here. Just kind of the stems at the top of the plant. Okay, so we got eight cups of basil in here and we are filled to the top. I can’t fit any more in. Two cups of Parmesan here. [Music] [Music] Okay, that’s pretty much the entire Parmesan block. See if that’s it. So, we have one cup right here. Oh, yeah. Little extra. Okay, we need eight garlic cloves. So, we’re going to use these from our Cookamo King harvest. Look at these cloves. Look at that. So, we need eight. One, two, three, four, five. Six. Seven. All right. I’m actually just going to use these um seven that I have here. I don’t know if you can see that garlic clove, but that is ginormous. So, that is way bigger than a typical garlic clove that you might have that’s that size. So, we’re going to get our eight garlic cloves. Let’s get them in there. We had a little visitor coming to hang out. I don’t know if you can see him there. It’s a That’s a praying mantis. Okay, we’re going to take those uh eight garlic cloves. Throw those into the food processor here. [Music] I don’t know if you can see the size of that garlic clove. Just massive. Okay. So, now we’re going to take our eight cups of basil, eight garlic cloves, and then we are going to take our one cup of nuts. So, again, I’m taking one cup here. I’m going to fill that up about halfway with the pecans. And then, walnuts are so good for you. I just don’t really eat them a lot, but I know they’re really good for you. So, we’re going to toss those in there. They’re a little over. Make that a little bit rounded. Throw that in. Okay. Wow, we are stuffed. And let’s get blending. All right. So, I’m a little bit at like a capacity issue here right now. Just kind of heads up. Uh if you kind of have like the standard size uh kisinart, uh the eight cups, we’re pushing it to the limit. So I got to kind of move things around here a little bit before I put the parmesan in. Okay. Next, we’re going to take our two cups of parmesan. All right. Look at that. Make that a little bit rounded. And if you’re wondering what size at the store two cups of Parmesan is, I just looked at the wrapper and it’s 8 oz. All right, let’s put that in. Let’s give that a whirl. Now we’re going to put in our two cups of organic extra virgin olive oil cold pressed. Prefer single origin when you can look into that and why. Uh so all right and I didn’t know this for a long time but this is always for your liquid measures and this is for your dry measures. Good to know. So, we’re going to go two cups and we’re going to set that aside. All right. So, we have our two cups of extra-virgin olive oil here. We’re going to go ahead and slowly start to pour that in. There’s one cup. Again, we’re pretty full here. Just take some lemon a little bit. Just kind of a squeeze on both. So, I added pepper and salt. kind of just a taste for right now as I’ve only put in one cup of the olive oil. That way things can incorporate. We’re going to go ahead and finish up here with our final cup of olive oil. I’m going to taste a little bit here. Hope you can see that. The color looks great. Consistency is great. Let’s try it out. It’s good. Blend up really well. Man, that garlic really pops. Wow. All right, let’s try this. Really good. Let’s put these in jars. Okay, now it’s time to store. So, again, the eight cups in this uh processor was a little much. So, just heads up there. Again, I quadrupled this recipe. I’m going to add in the description below um just the original 1/4 of this overall recipe. So, I’ll have that down below plus my uh recipe that I used in this video. So, let’s go ahead and see. This should make about four cups. Let’s see how much we have. All right. Perfect. Look at that. We have exactly four cups. All right. Okay. So, time to fill up our jars. [Music] [Applause] [Music] So, there you have it. That made uh about six half pint jars. I left quite a bit of space at the top just so I could even out everything in the jars. And again, we’re going to put these in the freezer. Just grab them out anytime during the fall, winter. It’s like having summer in a jar. Making homemade pesto doesn’t get any easier or better than this from harvesting fresh basil from your backyard. So, if you could give us a like, please subscribe. We’re trying to grow the channel and uh yeah, we just want to bring you more content on how to grow your own harvest and make amazing meals. We’ll see you next time. [Music] [Applause] [Music]