What to Do With Basil Besides Pesto: Five Recipes Where It Steals the Show

Basil is at its best right now — aromatic, slightly sweet, and fragile enough that it needs to be used quickly. These five recipes treat it as the main event rather than a garnish: a raw tomato marinade, a zucchini salad, a pasta with homemade basil oil, savory cookies for aperitivo, and a Sicilian-style granita that turns basil bright green and intensely fragrant. Five ways to use the bunch before it wilts.

Basil-Marinated Cherry Tomatoes are the simplest recipe on this list and the one that best shows what basil can do. Piccadilly tomatoes halved, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil, and a generous handful of basil, then left to marinate for an hour. The basil infuses the oil, the tomato juices collect in the bowl, and the result is something that smells extraordinary and goes with everything. Caperberries and lemon zest finish it off.

Pro tip: use the marinating juices as a dressing for bread or cold pasta — nothing goes to waste.

Zucchini Salad with Mint and Basil is the side dish that makes the most of two summer herbs at once. Zucchini slices are blanched briefly to keep them tender with a slight bite, then dressed with olive oil, garlic, mint, and basil. Serve warm, at room temperature, or cold from the fridge the next day — it improves as it sits.

Pro tip: add grated lemon zest or toasted chopped almonds for extra texture and a brighter flavor.

Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato, Basil, and Stracciatella is a three-ingredient pasta that requires one technique worth knowing: basil oil, made by blanching the leaves for 30 seconds, blending them with seed oil, and passing the result through a paper-towel-lined sieve. The bright green oil goes into the pasta at the end, alongside a raw blended cherry tomato sauce and spoonfuls of stracciatella. The basil stays vivid, the tomato stays fresh, and the stracciatella melts into the heat of the pasta.

Pro tip: make sure the syrup is very cold before adding the basil to the granita mixture — it prevents oxidation and keeps the color brilliantly green.

Savory Basil Cookies are the Italian aperitivo snack that makes everyone guess the secret ingredient. A simple dough of flour, cold butter, Grana Padano, and fresh basil blended with egg — the basil is what gives them their distinctive green color and aromatic kick. Crumbly, savory, and impossible to stop at one. Put them on the table and watch people reach for them before they've even sat down.

Pro tip: the dough needs 20 minutes in the fridge before rolling — cold butter is what gives the cookies their characteristic crumbly texture.

Lemon and Basil Granita with Caramelized Peaches is the most ambitious recipe on this list — a chef's take on Sicilian granita from Ugo Alciati. Basil is blended into a cold lemon syrup to create a vivid green granita, scraped every hour as it freezes. The caramelized peaches are cooked whole with basil leaves and a little sugar until their skin lifts and a golden syrup forms in the pan. The contrast between the icy granita and the warm, caramel-edged peach slices is what makes this dessert worth the effort.

Pro tip: the granita keeps in the freezer for up to a month — make a big batch and scrape as needed.

Most people use basil three ways: pesto, pizza, caprese. These five recipes are the argument for the fourth, fifth, and sixth. Basil in a granita, basil in a cookie, basil oil on pasta. The herb that smells like summer turns out to have a lot more to say than anyone expected.