Baby Spinach Pesto
This baby spinach pesto is a fresh and vibrant twist on the classic. Made with almonds, parmesan, lemon zest, and garlic, it’s the kind of versatile sauce I love keeping in the fridge. It’s perfect tossed through pasta, spread onto sandwiches, or spooned over roasted veggies. I make it in minutes with whatever I have on hand, and the baby spinach gives it a gorgeous green colour and mild flavour that pairs beautifully with almost anything.
Ingredients
- 100g baby spinach
- 30g almonds
- 50g parmesan, grated
- 1 small garlic clove
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 60ml olive oil (plus extra if needed)
- Pinch sea salt flakes
Instructions
- Add the spinach, almonds, Parmesan, garlic, lemon zest, olive oil, and salt to a food processor or mini chopper. Blitz until smooth and well combined.
- Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed. If the pesto is too thick, drizzle in a touch more olive oil or add a splash of warm water to loosen it up.
- Use immediately or transfer to a jar and store in the fridge.
Notes
- Baby spinach makes a milder, more delicate pesto than traditional basil. It's a great way to use up spinach that's about to turn and works beautifully as an everyday alternative to classic pesto.
- I use this mini food processor for small batches of pesto. It's perfect for getting a smooth consistency without needing to scrape down the sides constantly.
- Almonds give a slightly sweeter, creamier flavour than pine nuts. If you prefer, you can toast them lightly in a dry pan first for extra depth, but it's not essential.
- The lemon zest adds a lovely brightness that lifts the whole thing. Don't skip it.
- If you want a bit more punch, add a squeeze of lemon juice along with the zest.
- For a milder garlic flavour, use half a clove or blanch it briefly in boiling water before adding.
- This pesto is quite thick, which makes it ideal for spreading. If you're using it as a pasta sauce, you'll want to loosen it with pasta water rather than just olive oil to help it coat the pasta properly.
- Store in an airtight jar in the fridge for up to 5 days. Pour a thin layer of olive oil over the top to prevent oxidation and keep it bright green.
- You can freeze this pesto in ice cube trays for up to 3 months. Pop out individual cubes as needed and defrost at room temperature or stir directly into hot pasta.
What I Cook With
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Nutrition Information:
Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 77Total Fat: 7gSaturated Fat: 1gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 5gCholesterol: 4mgSodium: 105mgCarbohydrates: 2gFiber: 1gSugar: 0gProtein: 2g
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Baby Spinach Pesto
A Pantry, A Pesto, and a Whole Lot of Joy
This baby spinach pesto came about entirely by accident, which, let’s be honest, is how some of the best things happen in my kitchen. I’d planned to make my Tuscan Chicken with Rosemary Roast Potatoes today, but I woke up feeling rotten and absolutely not in the mood for creamy chicken, so leftover sweet and spicy Chinese beef it was! The problem was I had this enormous bag of baby spinach sitting in the fridge, quietly judging me every time I opened the door – I couldn’t let it go to waste. And what do we do with excess greens? Pesto, of course.
My new KitchenAid chopper has been getting an absolute workout lately, and I’m in love. It’s just the right size for small batches like this, and I’ve become obsessed with using it for pesto. Also helping the obsession along are my new glass jars with acacia wood lids and my very fancy Niimbot label maker. I’m in full organisation mode – even my Rinkit jars are finally being labelled and prepped for my new pantry. It’s taken me two years to get to this point, but I’ve finally started feeling like myself again. My home is reflecting that too, which just makes me feel so happy I could burst.
And look, not to be dramatic, but this might be my best pesto yet. It even tops my beloved pesto alla trapanese. It’s smooth, mild, and utterly moorish. I could’ve eaten the whole bowl with some bread and called it a day. But instead, I’m planning to swirl it through bowls of pasta all week long because pesto pasta is everything. Especially when you’re still crawling out from the fog of what was probably Covid. (Yep, had that too. Still feeling rotten.)
The Pantry That Nearly Defeated Me
Now let’s talk about my new pantry, because this baby spinach pesto journey has a sub-plot. It took me three nights to put the whole thing together. I’d been dreaming about proper storage for ages, and this unit is a beast. Genuinely, it’s perfect. Tall, spacious, and the ideal blank canvas for my new jars and labels. There’s something so satisfying about order, and when you’ve been through grief and heartbreak and just surviving, the simple act of labelling a jar can feel like a triumph.
But oh, the shame!! After finally assembling the whole thing, I couldn’t lift it upright and get it into place. It was too heavy, too awkward, and I was still in my pyjamas at 10am on a Friday morning, so I did what any determined, half-sick woman in pyjamas would do. I wandered across the road and asked one of the tradies working on the neighbour’s renos if he could lend a hand. He was lovely, didn’t judge me at all, and got it sorted in less than a minute. Not all heroes wear capes – sometimes it’s steel capped boots.
I’m now completely smitten with this new corner of my kitchen. The pantry feels like a symbol of where I’m at: not fully healed, not fully there yet, but on my way. Every jar, every label, every batch of pesto in a glass jar with a cute lid – it all tells a story of slow, gentle progress. Which is exactly the pace I’m working with right now.
Why Baby Spinach Just Works
When I first made this, I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing. I thought it’d be fine, you know? Just a decent way to use up spinach before it went sad and slimy. But turns out, baby spinach might just be my new favourite base for pesto. It’s soft, mellow, and blends like a dream. And unlike basil, it doesn’t go brown within seconds of hitting the air.
The thing is, baby spinach doesn’t fight for attention. It lets everything else sing while quietly doing its job in the background – and I love that. Especially in this pesto, where the almonds and lemon zest bring zing, the garlic gives warmth, and the parmesan adds that rich, salty depth that just ties it all together.
And the best bit? It goes with everything. Pasta, of course, but also stirred through roasted potatoes, dolloped on grilled chicken, or spread on toast with a bit of extra cheese. I’m telling you, this stuff is gold. And when you’re tired and just want something easy and nourishing, it doesn’t get better than this.
Ingredient breakdown
Baby spinach
Baby spinach makes a milder, more delicate pesto than the classic basil version, with a subtle earthiness that works as an everyday alternative rather than a direct substitute. It’s also a genuinely brilliant way to use up a bag of spinach that’s getting close to the edge. Use it fresh and raw straight from the bag. Unlike the carrot tops in the carrot top pesto, there’s no prep required beyond measuring it out, which makes this one of the more straightforward pestos you can make.
Almonds
Almonds replace the pine nuts you’d typically find in a classic pesto, and they bring a slightly sweeter, creamier flavour that suits the mildness of the spinach really well. You can toast them lightly in a dry pan first for extra depth and a slightly more complex nutty flavour, but it’s genuinely not essential here the way it is with pine nuts. Raw almonds blend into a smooth, creamy consistency without much effort, especially in a good food processor.
Parmesan
Freshly grated Parmesan adds the salty, savoury backbone that every pesto needs. It also helps with the texture, thickening the pesto and giving it that cohesive, spreadable consistency. Grate it yourself if you can because pre-grated Parmesan doesn’t incorporate as smoothly. If the pesto comes out thicker than you’d like, reach for more olive oil before adding more cheese, because additional Parmesan will thicken it further rather than loosening it.
Garlic
Just one small clove here, which is deliberately restrained compared to a lot of pesto recipes. Baby spinach has a delicate flavour and too much raw garlic would bulldoze it completely. If you want something even milder, use half a clove or blanch it briefly in boiling water before it goes in. The garlic mellows as the pesto sits, so taste it after a few minutes in the fridge before deciding it needs adjusting.
Lemon zest
Lemon zest rather than lemon juice, which gives you the bright citrus flavour without adding extra liquid that would throw off the consistency. It lifts the whole pesto and stops it from tasting flat, which is the risk with a spinach-based pesto that doesn’t have the assertive flavour of basil to carry it. Don’t skip this one. If you want even more brightness, add a small squeeze of juice as well, but start with just the zest.
Olive oil
Sixty millilitres goes in with everything else at the start rather than being drizzled in slowly the way you would with a larger batch pesto. Because this is a smaller quantity being blitzed all at once, adding it upfront works fine and still gives you a smooth, well-emulsified result. If the pesto comes out thicker than you’d like, a little extra olive oil or a splash of warm water loosens it without changing the flavour. Warm water is actually the better choice if you’re planning to use it as a pasta sauce, because it helps it coat the pasta more evenly.
Sea salt flakes
A pinch goes in with everything before blitzing, and then you taste and adjust at the end. The Parmesan brings its own salt so go easy initially and season up from there. Sea salt flakes have a cleaner flavour than table salt and dissolve well during processing so you get even seasoning throughout the pesto rather than it all sitting at the bottom of the jar.
Serve This With
- Tossed through hot pasta with a little pasta water
- Spread on sandwiches or stirred through grain salads
- Drizzled over grilled fish or roasted vegetables
