Basil recipes

This is pesto as it should be — made with a generous pile of fresh basil and eaten the same day. Trofie pasta catches the sauce in every twist, but the pesto itself is the thing: bright green, fragrant, and tasting unmistakably of summer. Once you have made it properly you will struggle to go back to a jar.

Roasting the tomatoes low and slow concentrates their sweetness and gives this soup a depth you simply cannot get from a tin. A whole pot of fresh basil is stirred through at the end, turning the soup a vivid, herby red and filling the kitchen with the smell of August. This is the soup to make when your garden is drowning in both tomatoes and basil.

This salad is peak August on a plate. Grilling the peaches until they caramelise brings out their sweetness and gives them a slight smokiness that cuts through the richness of the mozzarella. A deeply flavoured basil dressing — made by blending a full 40g of leaves into the oil — ties everything together and makes the dish feel genuinely complete rather than just assembled.

Pad Krapow Gai is one of the great weeknight dishes — genuinely fast, genuinely flavourful, and built around a mountain of fresh basil that wilts into the hot wok and perfumes every bite. This version uses sweet Italian basil in place of the traditional holy basil, which is near-impossible to find in the UK, and the result is a beautifully fragrant, slightly sticky stir-fry that you will want to cook every week in August.