Easy Vegan Pesto with Homegrown Peashoots
This vegan pesto with peashoots is delicious! It’s easy and so fulfilling to grow your own ingredients and then use them in a quick and tasty dish! Yum!
I’ve been craving pesto lately. Didn’t have any since quitting dairy completely a while ago. It was always my lazy go to food when I couldn’t be bothered to cook. Cook pasta, cut some veggies, add pesto, done! So easy and always tasty. But I noticed that anything with cheese in it was giving me digestive issues. So the only way to eat pesto now is to make my own and honestly, it’s so easy and you control exactly which ingredients are used so even if you can eat dairy this is definitely the way to go! And you can get very creative, no need to stick with the basic basil pesto version. You can try all kinds of greens and herbs, you can add different types of nuts and oils. The sky is the limit! Today I’m using peas and some homegrown peashoots and they work so well in a pesto sauce!
Growing Peashoots
Growing peashoots is very easy, you don’t even need a garden and it takes just a couple of days til you have some super tasty fresh young peashoots to use in pesto, but also in salads, soup and much more!
All you need is the following:
- a handful of dried green peas (make sure they’re whole peas), you can just buy them in the supermarket
- a glass of water to soak them in
- a small tray (can be some food packaging that you reuse for this, I used a plastic take-away sushi-box)
- a bit of potting soil
How to grow your peashoots:
- soak your peas for 12hrs
- fill a small tray with a thin layer of potting soil
- add your peas on top of the soil, they can be quite close together
- add a thin layer of soil on top of the peas and water the soil to make sure it’s all moist
- place your tray on a window sill (don’t think this is truly necessary but that’s what I did)
- wait until your peas germinate and start to grow
- check daily to see if you need to water the soil a bit more, the soil should stay moist but does not have to be overly wet.
- after a couple of days your peashoots will already be big enough to harvest
Tips:
Don’t soak too many peas, you only need a small amount, a tablespoon or maybe two is more than enough for a sushi tray.
And if you cut the peashoots above the first set of true leaves they peashoots will grow again and you can harvest more than once!
Making Vegan Pesto with Peashoots
I was looking at different recipes to use my freshly grown peashoots and stumbled upon a pesto recipe by Broma Bakery that seemed very good to me and since I’d been craving pesto for some time I decided to give it a go. I ended up veganising it and it turned out so amazing! Most pesto recipes will include some sort of hard cheese, often Parmesan, so to veganise it we need to replace the parmesan by a vegan alternative.
The easiest way to replace Parmesan in a vegan recipe is to simply use some nutritional yeast. But there are also many other recipes floating about where you use ground up nuts or seeds and add not only nutritional yeast but also some spices and other ingredients to create a more complex flavour, and a similar sort of umami taste like real parmesan has. While they generally don’t taste exactly like real Parmesan they do taste great and are a good vegan replacement for the real thing.
I used ground almonds and added some garlic powder, onion powder, miso, lactic acid (which adds a cheesy tangy taste) and salt. You could use other ground up nuts or seeds like cashews, sunflower or pumpkin seeds. Lactic acid powder can be hard to come by if you live in Europe so if you can’t find it, just add a some extra lemon juice to the pesto.
To make the pesto I just added all the ingredients to a deep jar and simply blended it with a stick blender. This way I had the least washing up to do. But feel free to blend it in a kitchen machine or power blender. No need to blend it til it’s super smooth, it’s OK to leave it a little bit chunky.
Easy Vegan Pesto with Peashoots
Equipment
- deep jar
- stick blender, kitchen machine or power blender
Ingredients
For the Vegan Parmesan
- 1 cup ground up almonds, cashews, pumpkin or sunflower seeds (you can ground them up yourself with a blender, just be careful not to blend too much or you'll have a nut butter instead!)
- 1 tbsp light miso
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast flakes
- ½ tsp sea salt
- ½ tsp onion powder
- ¼ tsp garlic powder
- ¾ tsp lactic acid powder
For the Peashoot Pesto
- ½ cup vegan 'Parmesan' (you can use the rest of the veg Parmesan to sprinkle on top of your pasta or for other dishes)
- 1 cup fresh or thawed frozen green peas
- 1 small handfull peashoots
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 1 clove garlic
- 1 juice and zest of 1 lemon
- ½ cup of fresh basil leaves
- 1 small handfull of mint leaves (I used the leaves of 2 long sprigs of my mint plant)
- ⅓ cup olive oil
Instructions
How to Make the Vegan Parmesan
- If you haven't done it yet, first ground up your nuts or seeds
- Then mix your ground up nuts and all the other ingredients for the parmesan in a jar and with a fork simply stir everything til all the ingredients are well mixed. I would not do this in a blender cause you'l quickly over blend it end up with a sticky mess.
How to Make The Vegan Peashoot Pesto
- Add all the peashoot pesto ingredients to a deep jar and blend with it stick blender til everything is well combined. It does not need to be super finely blended. If it's still a bit too dry you can add some more oil. Alternatively you could also blend all the ingredients in a kitchen machine or power blender.
- Taste to see if it's to your liking and if necessary you can add more lemon juice, season it a bit more with salt or even add some chilli of you like to give it some kick.
- Serve on pasta, a salad, sandwich, potatoes or anything else you could think of eating it with! Or store in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks (I'm sure it will long be finished by then though!) or freeze for up to 3 months!
- Enjoy!
If you’re interested in other vegan cheese recipes be sure to check out my Vegan cashew cream cheese recipe! More vegan cheese recipes will follow soon, I’m experimenting with lots of new recipes at the moment!
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21 June 2021 by INE BEERTEN
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