CORNWALLVILLE, N.Y.

MARIA GANDARA stood next to a food processor, waiting for the hum.

Inside a four-quart tub churned a bright green, ambrosial slurry of basil, garlic, pine nuts, Italian parsley, pecorino Romano cheese and olive oil. It looked like ordinary pesto, but it might as well have been some rare liquid drug.

Ms. Gandara and her husband, Gregor Trieste, have spent the last decade running a company called Buddhapesto out of their 19th-century farmhouse, not far from Woodstock. For many customers, a mere spoonful of their one and only product inspires devotion so fierce, it borders on fanatical.

As any highly paid trendspotter (or savvy 12-year-old) could tell you, we’re living through a culinary boomtime for all things small-batch and artisanal: chocolate, jam, mayonnaise, gin. Some are tributes to the power of cool packaging. Others, though, are unexpectedly extraordinary.

Acolytes of Buddhapesto, which is sold year-round at stores and farmers’ markets around the Hudson Valley, will tell you stories about guzzling eight-ounce containers on the spot, of hoarding it, of hiding it from their spouses, of stirring it into soups and smearing it all over omelets and scallops and apple slices. These are the people who stew in bruised silence for an entire morning if they learn that Mr. Trieste has been unable to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to an open-air market in Westchester County.