A very delicate Trentino lettuce pesto on the table today. A simple recipe to avoid throwing away the outer leaves of a nice head of mountain lettuce.
I particularly love this lettuce so crunchy and tender and when summer arrives, it’s always on the table.
The Trentino lettuce is also called Rossa di Trento or Ubriacona di Trento because of its beautiful red/green colour.
With this type of lettuce you can prepare very chic and colourful salads with summer vegetables, legumes, grains. Naturally the same pesto can be made with escarole, endive, curly lettuce or whichever lettuce you prefer.
Let’s move on to the very simple pesto and meanwhile here are other ideas with seasonal lettuces:
- Difficulty: Very easy
- Cost: Very inexpensive
- Preparation time: 5 Minutes
- Portions: 1Jar
- Cooking methods: No-cook
- Cuisine: Mediterranean
- Seasonality: Spring, Summer and Autumn
Lettuce Pesto Ingredients
With a few outer leaves from the head you’ll get a small jar of pesto to use for pasta for 4 people.
- 5 leaves lettuce
- 1 oz almonds
- 1 pinch coarse sea salt
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 3 leaves basil (optional)
Tools
- 1 Immersion blender
Steps for Trentino lettuce pesto
The Trentino lettuce pesto is very quick and then…dress pasta or spread on crostini
Wash the lettuce leaves well, squeeze out excess water and tear into pieces.
Put them into the jug of the immersion blender together with the almonds and basil leaves, and start blending. Add the oil in a thin stream and the pinch of salt, blending until you obtain a smooth cream. Adjust the amount of oil to your liking.
Pour into a jar, add a little more oil to cover and store in the refrigerator, or freeze.
Tips and storage
As I said, the pesto keeps for a couple of days in the fridge. When you have outer leaves from vegetables, instead of throwing them away wash them very well and make pestos to freeze. You can do it with cauliflower, with the radish leaves, with the carrot tops, with the stalks of asparagus.
