20121019

Sandwich Mechanics: Pesto... on a sandwich!?

I could probably end this entire blog post with like three words: "that's pretty tasty," but I'm a wordy guy, so we'll talk about this unnecessarily. Well, moreover, I actually have a specific pesto spread I was trying, and which I can recommend wholeheartedly.

That pesto spread is this weird Pesto Alla Genovese from Trader Joe's--sorry, Trader Giotto's, haha. Apparently Amazon is saying this thing costs $10 for a dinky bottle. What the heck! I don't actually know how much this cost because my wife brought it home on a whim this one time.

But it's pretty tasty.

The consistency is well suited to a spread for a sandwich. Pesto can sometimes be a bit thin or extra chunky, but this one is thick enough to spread well straight out of the fridge, and it doesn't thin out and soak the bread during the day. These things are important.

It's got a pretty strong pesto taste, so if you put a lot of it, it's going to start creeping over even the taste of your meat and cheese. You're not going to want to overdo this one. As they say in the recipe books, put it on "to taste." Useless.

Perhaps more important is making sure it's paired well with the other things in your sandwich. In general, there are a lot of things you can throw together in a sandwich that won't clash, but the thought of putting Miracle Whip (or any sweet spread, for that matter) on one side and pesto on the other side just made me cringe.

It's like the other day I had pasta with Italian sausage and pesto in it. It just wasn't right. It would have been much better with chicken instead. Bad like toothpaste and OJ, yanno?

So I do mayonnaise on one side and pesto on the other, and hey, it's pretty tasty.

If you're awesome, make your own pesto instead. It's not too hard, but you might have a tougher time hitting the really nice spreadable consistency. To me, it's along these lines that the $10 becomes worth it: even if you do nail the consistency, fresh pesto will go bad relatively quickly unless you freeze it, but then it's a hassle defrosting it conveniently to get on sandwiches on a regular basis. I think they've got some weird preservatives in there (which I guess will turn some people off) that make this stuff last for a few months. I guess maybe it is worth $10 for that?

Do I need to say that it's pretty tasty? Cause it is.

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