The art of Italian cooking: pesto sauce

Hi, this is the thirteenth post about Italian cuisine.

Today’s post is dedicated to pesto sauce.  Why pesto sauce if the last posts were about Italian pasta recipes?

For pesto sauce is used in Italy to toss a lot of pasta shapes: trenette, trofie, linguini, lasagna …

You can also use it to toss gnocchi (potato dumplings) and for pizza topping.

Homemade pesto sauce

You can find ready made pesto sauce or you can prepare it at home: but homemade pesto sauce is fantastic!

Read the authentic recipe of Italian homemade pesto in this page.

If you prepare pesto sauce at home you can choose between two ways: mortar or food processor. Obviously you save your time using food processor but you have the best result with a mortar.

The most common questions about pesto are:

- how can I preserve pesto sauce?

Keep pesto sauce in the fridge up to 4-5 days but remember to cover it with olive oil as you can see in the photo.

You can also freeze your pesto sauce (up to 2 months) but remember to divide it into  the portions you use to toss pasta.

- I like pesto sauce very much but how can I make it in winter when there is no fresh basil?

In Italy we use winter pesto during cold months. We make it with the most tender leaves of Swiss chard.

Ingredients / Serves 4

50 g (1 3/4 oz)  tender Swiss chard leaves, cleaned

1 garlic clove

15 g (1/2 oz) pine nuts

10 g (1/3 oz) Pecorino cheese, grated

10 g (1/3 oz) Parmesan cheese, grated

9-10 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt

Swiss chard leaves must have no veining. Combine the ingredients as you can read in the summer pesto recipe.

Greetings from Italy

Carlo & Loretta