Why Does My Pesto No Longer Love me? A Culinary Call For Help.

This flu is unusually severe.  Get your vaccinations this year if you have not in the past.  Or get the flu and  feel like something that's drawn through the wood chipper, repeatedly.

I'm slowly creating an actual post in my head, in the few available tiny spaces between the giant snot deposits.  But in the meantime, I have a culinary question for you:

What makes pesto taste worse than Trump's ideas?

I have made pesto for years, from all kinds of nuts and all kinds of herbs.  Some combinations are tastier than others, but all of them have been acceptable.  Except recently.

Five times I have had to throw large amounts of pesto down the sewer because of an extremely strong metallic (or bitter) aftertaste it gives*.  Changing the olive oil has not helped, guaranteeing the freshness of the herbs and the nuts has not helped.

So I suspect the garlic.  I am bigoted toward recent garlic.  In the olden days it was easy to peel, but now it takes me hours to peel enough cloves.  And the cloves seem often to be miniature cloves inside something that initially looks like a normal-sized clove.

Is it the garlic?  Or something else?

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*  I first tried doctoring it with more cheese or more herbs and so on.  Nothing made it edible.  And it's not the cheese that's at fault, because after the first mishap I tasted the mixture before cheese was added.

And the taste is there.  I don't quite know if it is bitter or metallic or salty.  It's a little of all those things, but whatever it is, the message to my taste buds is negative.