Okay, if you watched our stuffed piquillo pepper clip, you simply top it with almond and parsley salsa verde. And I love to show you how to make this really, really, it’s a versatile and simple sauce and it only has a few ingredients and it’s very adaptable as I’ll explain later. But here we go.
Here is the basic four ingredients. I have some roasted almonds, these are roasted and salted, okay. I have some nice Spanish olive oil, one clover garlic; in my case, use much as you want and Italian parsley. Okay very important, get the flat leaf, see? The flat, not the curly, much more flavorful and just I like it a lot better.
By the way here is a tip you may have seen in other clips, if you hold you knife at like a45-degree angle, a sharp knife by the way. And just kind of shave the leaves right off the stem of that parsley that’s still little bunched up, that’s a real easy way to get those leaves off without a lot of work. So, I rinsed it of course, shake it out and then chopped out those leaves. And I like to keep my herbs in a nice, tight, pile as I’m chopping and when it gets down to about that point, you can use the old one hand chop method. And I’m going to go about that small, alright. So put that aside, so it’s one bunch at a thyme and parsley washed and chopped and then I have about two-thrids of a cup of whole, roasted, salted almonds.
Now, you could use a food processor for this but to me it gets too pasty, alright. So, the first chop through, be careful because they are still in the whole pieces, they will shoot all over the place but once you get them started and once they stopped being round, then you can start chopping a little faster. So, just be patient the first couple times through so you don’t have nuts flying all over and then you can get a little more aggressive and I want to chop those fairly fine.
Alright, now what we’re going to do is we’re going to put the parsley and the almond together and then give it another chop to make it even more fine. So, what you really want to do is get this really pretty small, okay. This is going to be actually be a sauce or a paste, so I want it pretty small and I find by chopping the parsley and the almond together. I just have more you know, more stuff to work with and to me it’s just easier to chop that way.
Now again, if you use a food processor for this, I just don’t like the results, the blade with food processor just tears the parsley; liquid comes out. Again, you’re going to make a paste out of the nuts and it just—you’re just not going to get the same product. So, it’s really worth the extra time and effort here to use the knife and get a nice fine dice. And again, you go as fine as you want and you could actually keep chopping as down until it’s almost a paste but I’m going to stop right about pretty much there, okay.
So now, I put this in a bowl. I’m going to add one clove garlic. Alright now again, raw garlic goes a long way so I find one clove for this much as plenty for me. If you want to do a little more, feel free and then really the only other ingredient here, I want to put in about a third of a cup of olive oil and that is going to be one style, okay. So, that’s more of a paste or a pesto style almost, okay.
Now, that would be used maybe add into a pasta, to stuff a piece of meat with. If you add another addition of olive oil, I’m going to put another third of a cup in here, then you have more of like call it probably like spread, okay. And maybe that could spread over a piece of fish that you’re going to grill or you know, add some grilled vegetables. What I’m going to do is actually make it more of sauce. I’m going to call it a salsa verde, it’s a very generic term, any kind of green sauce. I’m going to actually add another about third of a cup, half a cup of olive oil. So, what I’m using is—which is going to be the piquillo peppers. I want it to be in more of a sauce consistency. So there we go, there is my third edition of oil. And again, you control the thickness here. It would have been fine just with that first amount of olive oil but I really want something that’s more of a lose kind of a flowing sauce. So, that is what I want with and again, very versatile, any green herb almost; basil, spinach, arugula, almost any nut will work.
Now, depending on what your serving this with, you might want to add a few things here at the end; lemon juice is very common, if you’re doing a fish, some sugar, vinegar is great, let’s say that’s on grilled chicken, there is a very common salsa verde served on grilled steak which has anchovy in it.
So again, this is a—what I showed is just the base. It’s the nuts, the fresh parsley, the olive oil, the garlic and again, I used a really nice and salted, roasted almonds so I didn’t need any additional salt or anchovy but anyway, you take that base and then you liven it up with whatever you want to add. And since I decide to serve this over those roasted piquillo peppers, stuffed with goat cheese, I really didn’t need any additions, okay.
Now again, this is not a sauce, you can eat it plain, all right. A little bit goes a long way. This is a condiment that really brings out the flavors of other dishes, okay. So, even if you taste it alone, it actually tastes very stronger, intense but you’ll see, put on some fish, put in on some grilled peppers, serve it with how I served it on my stuff to goat cheese piquillos and you’ll see what kind of magic happens.
Anyway, I hope you give this a try and enjoy.
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