Pesto sauce (a.k.a. Pesto alla genovese)
    
Preparation: 15 mins
Cooking: not required
    
Difficulty: Easy

Suitable for freezing
    
Vegetarian

Pesto sauce is a very popular sauce and nowadays you can easily get many different brands at the supermarket. However, what you buy at the supermarket rarely matches the taste and flavour of home made pesto prepared by the people from Liguria region of Italy (Genoa is the main city). The reason for this is mainly because food producers want to cut costs and in doing so, they use cheap ingredients and sometimes ingredients that have nothing to do with the real pesto: sunflower oil, parsley, green beans, potato flakes, cashew nuts are just a few examples of this.

Those who leave in Liguria, have access to the best of the ingredients:

Extra virgin olive oil from the “Riviera Ligure”, the best basil variety for making pesto sauce “basilico Genovese” (there are about 40 known basil varieties in the world) and pine nuts from local stone pine. Also the cheese plays an important role when making pesto and being close to the Sardinia region of Italy makes things easy when it comes to the supply of “Pecorino sardo” cheese.

Anyway, let’s see how we can prepare a good pesto sauce to top our pasta or gnocchi. For the pesto preparation we will use a blender (purists use pestle and mortar).

THIS IS TO TOP 500 g OF PASTA (SERVES 5)