If you love pesto, vegan arugula pesto is a great alternative. Not just for those enjoying a plant-based diet, this recipe is absolutely delicious. No one ever needs to get wind of its vegan credentials – thanks to a little extra salt, and the tanginess of arugula, you’d never guess anything was amiss.
Traditional and packaged pesto is typically made with parmesan cheese, which can make the classic hard to replace for those going vegan. This vegan arugula pesto recipe is beautiful with pasta, or as a salad dressing.
This is such a simple recipe too – it can be blitzed up in under ten minutes to swirl through pasta, pep up a salad or save in a jar for up to a week.
If you’ve enjoyed this recipe, you can get a dose of vegetarian, gluten-free (and totally delicious) food in my recipe guide, or grab my eBook collection of delicious salad recipes.
Vegan Arugula Pesto
Ingredients
- 3 Cloves Garlic
- 50g Pine Nuts
- 70g Arugula
- 50ml Olive Oil
- Juice of half a Lemon
Instructions
First, roughly chop the garlic and toast with the pine nuts, in a small pan over a low heat, for a few minutes.
When the nuts are golden brown and the garlic is beginning to cook – it doesn’t need to be cooked through – remove from the heat.
Then, take a blender and put in the arugula, the olive oil, and the lemon juice. Add the nuts and garlic to the bowl of the blender.
Return the lid to the blender and pulse for a good minute or so, until you can see a pesto forming. You may need to remove the lid and scrape down the sides before pulsing again.
This post was written by Zoe Pickburn. Zoe is a food blogger, recipe developer and content writer from Yorkshire. She shares gluten-free and vegetarian recipes that are (mostly) healthy and always delicious and serves up share-worthy (and drool-worthy) content, that gets food brands noticed. Catch Zoe’s own gluten-free + vegetarian food blog at eatsleeds.co.uk, tweet her @ZoePickburn and follow her on Insta @ZPickburn.
