Recipe for red pesto with tomato

Red pesto is good for so many things! For pasta dishes like this pasta salad with red pesto. IN pizza snails, filled tenderloin, one rye bread sandwich or stuffed chicken. Or maybe just as a dip for vegetable stems or a spread for a sandwich. It's so delicious with a good homemade pesto, because the taste is really in a completely different league than the ones you find in the supermarket. A homemade pesto contains only good ingredients and no cheap oils or other boring stuff. Just a few quality ingredients that together create the pure Italian flavor harmony! 

TIP: Also try the recipe at green pesto. 

Ingredients for tomato pesto

You can easily vary and customize the flavor of your red pesto to perfectly suit your taste preferences. Here are the basic ingredients:

Sun-dried tomatoes

The base for the pesto is sun-dried tomatoes. They have lots of intense umami flavor and give the pesto its red color. In this recipe, sun-dried in oil are used, as they have a softer consistency that is easier to blend. Alternatively, you can soak dried sun-dried tomatoes in boiled water for a couple of hours or make long-baked tomatoes for the pesto.

Parmesan

To give the pesto a creamy consistency and wonderful flavor, add grated parmesan. For a more Nordic version, you can also use cheese such as Vesterhavs cheese. And if you want to make the pesto vegan, you can either omit the pesto or use some yeast flakes as an alternative.

Garlic

Garlic adds a great flavor, and you can easily adjust the amount up or down to achieve the perfect strength. 

Nuts or seeds

You can easily use different nuts and seeds for your pesto. Most often pine nuts are used, but you can easily mix them with a little almonds or cashews. Both because it gives a coarser consistency, but also because pine nuts can be an expensive affair. Cheaper seeds that are good in pesto are sunflower seeds.

Herbs

In a classic red pesto, basil is used. However, it can easily be replaced with other herbs such as oregano, parsley or rosemary, or a mixture of different herbs from the garden.

Olive oil

The amount of olive oil will determine how liquid your pesto will be. However, it also helps to give the pesto a nice flavor, so it is highly recommended that you use a good virgin olive oil.

Lemon juice

To balance the fattiness of the pesto, it tastes great with a squeeze of lemon juice. Remember to taste the pesto and add a little more lemon juice if you like.