An authentic Italian recipe for pasta and pesto - with plenty of basil, pine nuts and parmigiano. Pesto pasta is one of the most popular dishes in Liguria, Italy. What you find in many places just isn't the same as what you are going to see here. In my recipe "pesto" really means, what pesto alla genovese should be... and very easy to make at home.
Pesto is a basil sauce that originated in the city of Genova in theLiguria region of northwest Italy.Italian purist insist that pesto can only be made using locally- grown Genoese basil, a small leafed variety with a delicate taste.The name is the contracted past participle of the Genoese word pestâ (Italian: pestare), which means to pound, to crush, in reference to the original method of preparation, with marble mortar and wooden pestle.
The ingredients in a traditionally made pesto are ground with a
circular motion of the pestle in the mortar. This same Latin root
through Old French also gave rise to the English word pestle.
