Sara Hohn – Food… Brooklyn & Beyond

One of the perks of writing about food is that people often direct me to their cherished local restaurants, shops and foods to check out. Knowing that I’m a bit fanatical about my pesto, (the pride of Genoa and one of my favorite foods since childhood), a friend turned me onto the pesto from Caputo’s Fine Foods on Court Street. I firmly believe that pesto is best enjoyed when made fresh by my mom, preferably in August. However, my friend qualified his recommendation: “It may not be the best pesto you’ve tasted. But it’s better than any commercially-produced pesto you’ve tasted.” That still sounded pretty good, so I decided to run an informal pesto taste test. I assembled Caputo’s pesto, a store-bought jar pesto and my own homemade pesto I had made and frozen. Here are the stream-of-consciousness results:

Store-bought pesto in a jar:

“Gloppy like old creamed spinach. Nasty lemony jar smell. Yellowish-grey color. Even cheese could not help this situation. This offends me and the taste will not leave my mouth. The only thing good about this pesto is that some of the profits go to grassroots peace efforts. But peace doesn’t always taste very good.”

Ingredients: fresh basil, vegetable oil (wrong!), garlic, salt, olive oil, pine nuts, “natural stabilizer,”
citric acid, oregano extract, spices, yuckiness.

Caputo’s pesto:

“Oily as hell with a sweet aroma and taste. A true harmony of basil and cheese. Hunter green with yellowish oil. Perfectly seasoned. I will eat this in small spoonfuls as a snack. So good I sort of resent it.”

Ingredients: fresh basil, parmagianno & romano cheese, pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, spices (no garlic? Is this subverting traditional pesto as we know it, or just a printing error?)

Homemade pesto:

“Totally uneven texture. Dirty olive color. Needs more oil. Resembles an illegal substance. Did I not salt this? Bitter. If I cut this with a wedge of pecorino, I may still eat this for lunch but would not serve it to others. I should really throw this out.”

Ingredients: fresh basil, parmagianno cheese, pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, all in somewhat arbitrary amounts.

My conclusion? At least in January, if not all the time, Caputo’s Fine Foods makes one of the best pestos out there next to mom’s.

Caputo’s Fine Foods
460 Court Street

Originally published on Until Monday: Brooklyn.