Eat as Italians eat #3. La mia pasta al pesto.
All the tricks and tips to prepare the original pesto alla ligure.
Dear readers,
Welcome to another edition of Eat As Italians Eat, my monthly column dedicated to Italian food.
In this newsletter I’m gonna share with you the recipe for preparing the perfect pesto alla ligure.
Pasta al pesto was definitely one of my favourite childhood comfort food: creamy, soft and rich in flavours. I still can remember getting back from school hoping that my mom had prepared me some spaghetti (my favourite pasta shape) al pesto for lunch. There was a time when I so obsessed with it that I used to eat it every other day, until I got sick of it and stopped eating pesto for over a year. Pasta al pesto is the life saver recipe par excellence and most of the time, let’s be honest, the pesto that we normally eat for a quick lunch is not even homemade, but it comes from the supermarket. In my mother’s defence I can say that when I was a child she never used the one from the supermarket. She had the smart habit of preparing pesto in large quantities and then storing it into small jars in the freezer. It was delicious. Besides being the best life saver recipe, pesto is also a very versatile recipe. It can be done in many different ways. For example you could replace the basil with parsley or tomatoes (as pesto alla trapanese recipe dictates), or you could use almonds or hazelnuts in place of the pine nuts. Today I’m gonna show you how to prepare the original Ligurian recipe. The one that first appeared on a cooking book written by Giovanni Battista Ratto around the mid 1800s and that demands ONLY the use of basil leaves as fresh herbs.
Let’s get started!
Ingredients Serving 2 people
80 gr Fresh basil leaves
70ml Extra virgin olive oil
½ Garlic clove
40 gr Parmesan
20 gr Pecorino sardo
15 gr Pine nuts
A teaspoon of granules of coarse salt
250 gr trofie
Method
Peel the garlic clove, cut it in a half and remove the germ from it. The germ, especially when the garlic is a little bit old, could turn green and taste bitter. That could strongly affect the flavour of your pesto, that’s why it’s always better to get rid of it. Take half a clove of garlic and put it in a marble mortar. Crush the garlic and make it into a paste. If you don’t have a mortar you can use a food processor instead. Honestly I didn’t have it in my kitchen and had to borrow it from my mother, the pesto expert of the family. Add pine nuts and grind them with the garlic into a sticky beige paste. The pine nuts in the original recipe don’t need to be toasted, but they are used raw.
The paste should have the aspect of the picture above. After obtaining it add the basil leaves and a small pinch of coarse sea salt. The coarse sea salt granules will act as an abrasive and they will help you to break down the basil leaves. Working the basil into paste is definitely the hardest part of the work. Make sure to make rotatory gentle movements. Be patient and look at the bright side: if you skipped the gym you shouldn’t worry about it, because working the basil into pesto is a perfect workout for your arms. And not to mention that the sauce made with a mortar has an unmistakable, silky and brilliant texture. Of course, as i previously said, if you don’t have a mortar, you don’t need to strictly follow the tradition. You can use a blender or a food processor instead and still obtain a great result. After you crushed the basil leaves, stir in the parmesan and the pecorino sardo and mix everything together.
Muddle in the extra virgin oil. Remember to add the oil gradually, until you reach the right consistency. Your pesto shouldn’t be neither too thick nor too runny.
When the water begins to boil toss in the pasta. Use trofie, a short, twisted pasta originally from Golfo Paradiso, in Liguria. When your trofie are ready, toss the pasta and the sauce together. Take a bowl, you could also use the pan where you boiled the pasta, but remember to turn off the heat. Pesto should NEVER be cooked, otherwise its original flavour would be altered.
Your pasta is ready. I strongly recommend you to pair with it a fresh glass of Vermentino wine. I hope you will smell the scent of Riviera Ligure in your kitchen!