Wild Garlic Pesto
This vegan wild garlic pesto is packed with fresh wild garlic, olive oil, and sunflower seeds, and can be prepared quickly and easily. Intensely flavorful, aromatic, and wonderfully creamy, it stands out from classic pesto mainly because it’s vegan and therefore completely free of Parmesan.
Various uses
Springtime is wild garlic season! From around mid-March, this delicious green awaits to be picked. Wild garlic has a spicy, aromatic flavor, and as a wild relative of garlic, it also carries a strong garlicky taste. Especially when eaten raw, like in this pesto, you might want to skip any upcoming dates… unless you both enjoy it.
Every season, I love turning wild garlic into a vibrant green vegan wild garlic pesto. I like to eat this vegan wild garlic pesto with spaghetti (e.g. as a topping on this creamy avocado pasta) , tagliatelle or linguine – as a pasta addict, I like to eat it with noodles. In addition to being used for spring pasta, this pesto also goes wonderfully with a variety of other dishes.
If you’re a fan of wild garlic, be sure to try the recipe for creamy wild garlic risotto or vegan spaetzle with wild garlic! Spaetzle are a type of Austrian pasta — maybe more like a pasta-dumpling hybrid.
You can use wild garlic pesto like a dip and add falafel or potato pancakes. Also together with vegan feta and tomatoes, or a dollop on top of Hummus (or even mix it in at the same time) or on a bowl, fit perfectly.
You can also easily eat wild garlic pesto with boiled potatoes, oven vegetables or asparagus, or as a spread in a sandwich. This pesto can also be baked in bread, for example in a flatbread or on focaccia – nom!
The other day, I’m planning to bake puff pastry rolls filled with wild garlic pesto for the first time—they have to taste just as good. And the first way I ever tried it was simply mixed with rice and peas—super easy and so delicious.
As you can see, this intense and super tasty pesto goes well with so many dishes. If you have another idea, feel free to add it in the comments!
Wild garlic with wild garlic and …
This vegan wild garlic pesto is quite compact, because there is a lot of wild garlic in here. So it’s not “thin and oily” like it’s often the case with pesto. This is intentional in this case because that’s how I like it best. I like the intense taste of wild garlic, but I don’t want to completely drown the food in oil.
What else is in the pesto, apart from a lot of wild garlic? In any case, vegan wild garlic pesto is not made that much differently than non-vegan. The only difference is in the cheese, because if you prepare vegan pesto, of course, no parmesan goes into it.
You will find several other good ingredients in this vegan pesto, in addition to lots of wild garlic. Oil, olive oil to be precise. You can also replace part of it with pumpkin seed oil, but please do not heat your pesto afterward.
Sunflower seeds are also added to the pesto. You can, of course, use other nuts like walnuts or other seeds like pumpkin seeds instead. Replacing some of the sunflower seeds with hemp seeds works wonderfully as well. Cashews or almonds are another option, though I haven’t tried them myself yet.
Finally, nutritional yeast, and parsley. I think that it gives the wild garlic pesto freshness and rounds off the very intense taste. Oh yes, and salt and pepper, of course.
Fresh & Free
Since I prefer to use lots of wild garlic, and it grows in large quantities, at least here in Vienna, I always pick it myself. It starts in March and by April it’s slowly over.
The best thing: these huge amounts of wild garlic are a hundred times fresher than from the supermarket, but they don’t cost me a cent. In Vienna, picking wild garlic is almost a national sport. You can usually find me at Augarten. But there is also growing a lot at Prater. Or recently I discovered tons in the Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark.
Harvesting wild garlic is very easy: “pinch off” the leaves with your fingernail and, ideally, collect it in a cloth sack to take home. At least I wash it at home before I put it to further use. And that brings me to the next final point…
Shelf life
Normally, when making pesto from herbs, they need to be dry, the pesto covered with plenty of oil, and the jar needs to be “sterile” (not surgical-style, but spotless). However, I have never stored a pesto for longer than a few days, simply in a Tupperware box or something similar.
Since I wash the wild garlic from the park anyway, the storage option in the form is out of the question for that reason alone. But it is possible to freeze the wild garlic pesto, namely in ice cube molds. The whole thing is super practical for dosing. By freezing, you can store your pesto until next spring.
But that’s not an option for me either, because I always eat so much wild garlic within a very short time that I don’t want to see it for months anyway, hahaha. I hope that you will love this pesto too, and I wish you bon appétit.
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Vegan Wild Garlic Pesto – Intense, Aromatic & Easy
Ingredients
- 5 tbsp sunflower seeds
- 150 g wild garlic
- 1 hand full of parsley some of the stalks can be included
- 8 tbsp olive oil a little more if you like
- 4 tbsp nutritional yeast *)
- 1 tsp salt
- black pepper
Instructions
- Roast the sunflower seeds in a pan without oil until they turn light brown. Leave to cool on a plate.
- Wash the wild garlic. Spread out a tea towel, place the wild garlic on top, and pat dry with another tea towel.
- Now chop the roasted sunflower seeds with the wild garlic and all the other ingredients (parsley, yeast flakes, salt, and pepper) in the food processor and mix.
- Slowly add the oil through the designated opening in the food processor. My food processor from KitchenAid has something like that. Otherwise, just add it to the other ingredients.
Notes
- Depending on how intense you like pesto, you could get by with it longer. I use this amount for about 500 grams of pasta – that’s quite generous.