Pesto sauce is one of the most common dressings in Italy, which was appreciated by lovers of good food. A delicious sauce, combined with many traditional dishes, is simple and affordable ingredients. It is prepared from products that can be bought at the nearest store, and the taste of true Italian is bright, rich, sunny. Want to know what pesto sauce is - what to eat and how to cook? Read carefully, we will tell you everything.

Classic green genovese pesto - what to eat with?

Classic Genovese pesto sauce is a green dressing that you will see in every Italian shop. It is called Pesto Genenese a la Olivia sauce. The last word in this phrase means oil. It is olive oil that is the basis of the sauce, so if you are going to reproduce the Italian dressing at home, do not skimp and find the best. For example, it may be Extra Virgin Oil.

They eat it with what they want. The Italians put a little sauce in the marinades, dress them with ravioli, use it as a dressing for salads, and add it in the preparation of pasta and pizza. Good sauce with chicken and pork. It goes well with any kind of meat.

How to make pesto sauce yourself

To make pesto with basil at home, you need to stock the following foods:

  • a good bunch of fresh green basil;
  • a couple of cloves of fresh garlic;
  • a handful of peeled pine nuts, about 80 grams;
  • 100 g parmesan;
  • coarse sea salt to taste;
  • 150 g of olive oil.

There is another outlandish component - the seeds of a special pine pine, but they are difficult to find, and they do not determine the taste of the sauce.
It is easier to mix all the components with a blender, but this will not be entirely correct.It’s better to be patient and to grind the sauce in a faience or metal mortar (the wood is not good here, the mortar preserves the aroma better). You need to start with greens, which are ground, sprinkled with a little salt. Then nuts and garlic are added, then parmesan and at the last moment everything is seasoned with oil. The sauce is ready!

Oil for it should be taken only cold pressed - it is the most healthy, tasty and retains a greater number of vitamins and minerals. But greens can be supplemented at your discretion. In addition to basil, pesto can be prepared with parsley, oregano, cilantro.

Pasta with Pesto Sauce

In general, the addition of green pesto to any pasta, whether it be spaghetti or any other type of pasta, will make the dish delicious and truly Italian. We recommend seasoning the boiled pasta with pesto sauce, and also add a little sourness to the dish with small cherry tomatoes. Sliced ​​mozzarella cheese will make the taste of this stunning dish even more tender and creamy.

It is done like this.

  1. Wash and cut 300 g of fresh cherry tomatoes into halves.
  2. In well-salted water, boil 300 g of pasta until al dente is ready, and discard. Approximately half a glass of drained water is left for the sauce.
  3. In this water, dilute the pesto sauce to a state of sparse yogurt, add tomatoes, ground black pepper there, mix everything, transfer the boiled pasta to the sauce and, stirring, serve on plates, decorating the dish on top with pieces of cheese (about 150 g are enough). A sprig of fresh basil is also suitable for decoration.

How to use sauce in pizza making

 

Why not diversify the taste of pizza by replacing the usual tomato sauce with green pesto? Simply spread the pizza base thick enough on the genovese sauce and then put everything that is usually added to the pizza. The taste is provided bright and rich!

Basil Pesto Bread

It turns out very delicious green Italian bread with pesto sauce.

Cooking:

  • 350 g of wheat flour;
  • 220 ml of mineral water;
  • 1 egg
  • half a spoonful of salt and a large spoonful of sugar;
  • one and a half teaspoons of yeast.

Cooked pesto sauce from the calculation: for 50 mg of oil, 2 bunches of herbs, 5 cloves of garlic, half a spoonful of salt.

Cook the yeast dough, let it come up, knead and wait for the second rise. Further, the dough is rolled into a rectangular layer, greased with green mass, rolled up and not cut along the very end to get two tails. They are intertwined like a tourniquet and, having fixed the tips firmly, they are laid on a greased baking sheet. After a half-hour proofing, bake in the oven at 190 degrees forty minutes.

Red pesto rosso - what is it combined with?

The second variant of the famous Italian pesto is a red sauce, which is prepared on the basis of olive oil with the addition of sun-dried tomatoes. It is spicy and sauce is in a different manner. Usually it is used for dressing spaghetti, for cooking pizza and additives in meat dishes. However, the scope is as wide as in the classic version of green pesto.

To make red rosso sauce, you will need:

  • 100 g of sun-dried tomatoes;
  • 100 g of cherry tomatoes;
  • 100 g of good olive oil;
  • 100 g of cheese (Italians use Romano Pecorino);
  • a little almonds in the petals for the sauce and to decorate it;
  • garlic.

Preparing the sauce is very simple. At first, slices of dried tomatoes are placed in the blender bowl, then basil, then garlic, freed from the internal arrows, is placed in the cloves, finally the oil is poured, cheese and almonds cut into small pieces are added (you can leave a little to sprinkle the dish). Everything is ground in a blender to a homogeneous mass.

The most popular combination of red rosso pesto is with spaghetti. Mix pasta cooked to al dente with cooked red pesto. To make the sauce easier to spread over pasta, add a little water drained from the pasta. And mix quickly. It will be very fragrant and delicious.For greater severity, red chili peppers are usually added to the sauce, freed from seeds and cut into pieces. The pesto is ground in a blender and stored in a tightly closed jar. You can pour olive oil on top of it.

Traditional Italian Minestrone Soup

Green pesto is an indispensable part of traditional Italian minestrone soup. More precisely, its Genoese version, which differs from the minestrone of other regions in that green pesto dressing is added to it and the Genoese soup prepare a more liquid consistency.
Like other soups, this is a vegetable dish, but you can cook it not only on water, but also on meat broth. Mandatory components - legumes, onions, celery, carrots, tomatoes. Plus other vegetables that are added seasonally.

We advise you to cook soup according to this recipe.

  1. Take one onion, a couple of stalks of celery and a couple of carrots cut medium-sized into cubes.
  2. Two or three potatoes, a small zucchini squash, pepper and three tomatoes finely chopped.
  3. In two tablespoons of olive oil, fry the onions with carrots and celery.
  4. Reducing the fire to the smallest, put other vegetables and stew them in juice for another quarter of an hour. At the end, add the finished beans from the jar.
  5. About five minutes before the end of cooking, add 50 g of small pasta and a handful of frozen green peas. We give it a boil and before the end of cooking we put a couple of spoons of the finished pesto sauce.

With seafood

The original warm salad can be quickly prepared with seafood and pesto.

It is prepared instantly, the taste is unusual, and the following products will be required:

  • seafood (you can take mussels, shrimps, squids, octopuses as a mixture or separately);
  • some cherry tomatoes;
  • bell pepper;
  • fennel and asparagus;
  • spices suitable for seafood;
  • pesto.
  1. Fry the seafood mix a little on the grill. If they are raw, then the mussels and octopuses should be slightly boiled, literally a couple of minutes.
  2. Flush the asparagus a little, rinse with cold water, cut.
  3. Chop pepper and tomatoes at random.
  4. Combine and season with a couple of spoons of pesto sauce.

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