Stealing a pesto recipe

The first time I ordered at Freddy Fresh Pizza about a year or two ago, I was unsure what to pick and ended up just trying to recreate one of the more typical vegetarian pizzas. However, after having finished it and looking at the price we paid (Freddy Fresh charges for additional ingredients) it occurred to me, that Freddy's pizza cannot be compared to the Italian ones I'm used to. So when we ordered takeout again, I looked through their menu again and chose the Venedig pizza.

Venedig is essentially a Pizza Margherita, with sliced tomatoes on it. But you also get two packs of pesto to put on top of your pizza. And let me tell you, that is the best pesto I've ever had.

I recently bought the pizza again, but this time I noticed that the label shows percentages for the ingredients.

So I decided to make a copy and try to replicate it myself.

rapeseed oil, basil 22%, hard cheese 12%, cashews 6%, olive oil, garlic, salt

From the nutrition facts I've also gathered that their pesto has 1.8 grams of salt per 100g.

I then put all of these values into a table. Unfortunately, some values are still missing: The amount of rapeseed oil, olive oil and garlic. Given that the food labels normally list the ingredients by amount (descending), I figured that both olive oil and garlic have to be less than 6%, but more than 1.8%. (And yeah, I study computer science, and yes, we do a lot of math) This means that the rapeseed oil has to be at least 46% and at most 54% of the pesto. I then assumed that 50% should be about enough (as it is easy to calculate and in the middle of these two values).

This means that the percentages of the olive oil and garlic combined, should be equal to about 8% (or 8.2%, to be precise). Because I find it very unlikely for both to take up 4%, I randomly decided on 5% olive oil and 3% garlic.

After writing all of this down, we get the following table:.

We grow a lot of herbs in our garden, and like most years, our basil plants ended up rarely used, with a lot of green leaves on them.

So I decided that making homemade pesto would be the perfect use for them. However, the pesto that is being served with the pizza comes in 40 gram packages, but 8.8 grams of basil is hard to eyeball. And given that fall is just around the corner, I decided to harvest all the basil, with the idea of being able to freeze some of it. (Which turned out amazing. I can only recommend silicone ice cube molds)

After sorting through the produce, and washing it, the basil weighted in at just about 80 grams.

As I didn't want to waste all of it (in case my recipe didn't work out), I decided to take 40 grams of it and adjust the recipe to fit the amount of basil I had.

To do so, I wrote a simple Lisp script (yes I can make this about programming), to calculate the weight and percentage in relation to the amount of basil. Some of you might notice that the code is incomplete, and that is because some of the tables above were generated using Lisp as well, and use the same variable definitions. If you are curious, you can take a look at the source code of this page.

(defun convert (name basil-amount)
  (setq basil-default (plist-get ingredients 'basil))
  (setq item (plist-get ingredients name))
  (/ (* item basil-amount) basil-default)
    )
(setq basil-amount 40)

(setq reldisplay (list '("Ingredients" "Amount in g" "Amount in %")))
(dotimes (i count)
  (setq name (nth (* i 2) ingredients))
  (setq weight (convert name basil-amount))
  (setq rel (/ weight basil-amount))
  (setq reldisplay (append reldisplay (list (list name (form weight) (form rel))))))
reldisplay

Either way, after calculating all of these values, I got out a measuring cup and started weighing the ingredients.

However, I only added about 3/4 of the rapeseed oil before blending the ingredients together, and added the rest after blending and stirred them together using a fork.

Afterwards, just leave the pesto for a couple of hours (you don't have to, but it might make it better). If you made too much, just freeze it in silicone ice cube molds, and put the frozen cubes on your hot pasta or pizza.

Enjoy.