A characteristic feature of Italian cuisine is the abundance of various sauces that can set off and complement the taste of any dish. The versatile pesto sauce is used as an appetizer and addition to fish, poultry and meat. Pasta with this sauce is also a traditional Italian dish.
Pesto sauce is a classic of Italian cuisine. Its name comes from the word pestato, which means to grind. If you use the traditional method of making pesto, you will need a mortar in which its ingredients are ground to a thick paste. The base for pesto is green basil, but sun-dried tomatoes are used in some Italian regions. In this case, the sauce is not green, but red. Italians add pesto almost everywhere - they coat fish, poultry and meat with it before baking, put it in soups and dressings, spread it and eat it along with toast and crackers. In the modern version, housewives use a blender to prepare this sauce, which, of course, can significantly save time. Thanks to its ingredients, pesto sauce contains a lot of calories, and the nutritional value of this dish is very high. Since it is prepared without resorting to heat treatment, all vitamins, trace elements and other useful substances contained in its ingredients are completely preserved in the sauce itself.
You can buy ready-made pesto sauce in supermarkets, but the one that you can make yourself at home will be much tastier. The fact that it will also be much cheaper does not even need to be mentioned. For pesto sauce you will need:
- 2-3 large bunches of fresh basil;
- 100 g of Parmesan cheese;
- 200 g of peeled pecans or pine nuts;
- 2 cloves of garlic;
- 100 g of olive oil;
- sea salt to taste.
Traditionally, green basil is used to make this sauce, but if you can't buy it, you can take purple one.
Wash and dry the basil using a special drying chamber for herbs or simply placing it on paper kitchen towels. Then tear off all the leaves from the branches, put them in the blender's chopper. Pour the pecans or pine nuts into a dry skillet and lightly fry over medium heat until golden brown. Add the nuts to the basil, put the garlic in a blender, add some sea salt, pour half the olive oil and grind everything into a homogeneous mass. Transfer the mixture to a separate bowl. Grate the Parmesan cheese on a fine grater, add it to a bowl, pour in the remaining olive oil and mix everything well, whisking the sauce with a fork. Transfer the finished pesto to a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid and store it in the refrigerator.
When adding salt, keep in mind that one of the ingredients in the sauce is Parmesan, which is a rather salty type of cheese. So try not to oversalt.
Boil pasta in the right amount, following the instructions printed on their packaging. You can use traditional spaghetti or bucatini for cooking, as well as regular noodles, but they must all be made from durum wheat. Throw the pasta in a colander, no need to rinse the pasta with water, put it in a saucepan and add the pesto sauce, stir and serve, garnished with basil leaves on top.
