Pesto alla Genovese

Ingredients

• 4 cups Fresh basil, leaves only, packed
• ⅜ cup Pine nuts
• 2 cloves Garlic
• ½ cup Parmesan cheese, grated
• ¼ cup Pecorino Romano, grated
• ½ cup Extra-virgin olive oil
• ½ tsp Kosher salt

Method

1. Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan over medium for 3 minutes, shaking constantly, until they smell like popcorn and are patched with gold. They burn in seconds.
2. Pulse the garlic, pine nuts and salt to a paste. Add the basil and pulse in short bursts — long processing heats the leaves and turns them black.
3. With the machine running, pour in the olive oil in a thin stream.
4. Pulse in both cheeses last. Pecorino brings the salt and the sharpness; parmesan brings the sweetness. Both is not fussiness, it is the recipe.
5. Taste for salt. Store with a film of oil on top to keep the surface from browning.

Notes

✨ The restaurant touch

Never heat pesto. Toss it with hot pasta off the burner; cooked pesto turns dull green and loses everything that made it worth making.

🧒 For the kids

Pesto pasta is a reliable dinner. Loosen it with a few spoonfuls of the hot pasta water so it coats rather than clumps.

🌿 From the garden

Pinch the flower buds off your basil all summer and one plant will supply four batches. Basil that has flowered turns bitter.

🥡 Leftovers

Keeps a week under oil in the fridge. Freeze it in an ice cube tray — two cubes is dinner for two in February.

Per serving

Computed from USDA FoodData Central values. A planning tool, not medical advice.