Pesto is a sauce originating in Italian cuisine, more precisely from Liguria. Its main ingredient is basil and behind all the flavors it carries there is a very traditional story that reaches our tables.

This time we will see how to prepare it at home, easy and simple that can well accompany pasta, rice and meat.

In fact, it is a versatile sauce and therefore, it is ideal to add to a pizza and any other dish that we like the most.

We can even prepare enough to keep it in the refrigerator and have it available for our meals.

Let’s see below the necessary and basic ingredients of the recipe and all the preparation :

Ingredients

• 50 gr. of Basil
• c/n of olive oil
• 20 gr. of walnuts (optional)
• 2 tbsp. grated cheese (Parmesan)
• Coarse salt
• 2 cloves of garlic

How to make Pesto?

1) First, peel the garlic cloves and crush it in a mortar with a little coarse salt. Remember that we have to obtain a pasty texture.

2) Then add the basil leaves and a few grains of coarse salt, crush everything and repeat the procedure as many times as necessary until you finish with the basil. We also add a few grains of coarse salt.

3) Now add the walnuts and crush until they are well ground, add the grated cheese and add all the ingredients.

4) This step is essential, we are going to alternate between drizzles of olive oil and crush the ingredients, repeat it until we achieve the desired texture.

We have this tasty pesto sauce ready, we can use it for the food we like the most!

Tips and Tricks:

• If we don’t have a mortar, we can process all the ingredients in the blender.
• Another recommendation is the cheese that we are going to choose, if we get the Parmesan cheese, much better.
• If we have the possibility of getting sea salt, it is undoubtedly the best choice, in any case with coarse salt you can prepare very well.
• With regard to the oil we are going to use, without a doubt, extra virgin olive oil is the best option.
• To maintain the tradition and as it has always been done we have to use a mortar, it will also take us little time and we can leave the sauce more or less fine to our liking.
• Having a little warm water at our fingertips is very useful when preparing pesto, we say this because when preparing the sauce and if it is too thick, what Italians usually do is add a few tablespoons of warm water from the cooking with which we have boiled the pasta. This helps to lighten it and achieve the desired texture.
• As a last suggestion, if we want to blanch the garlic, we place it in a saucepan with cold water and over medium heat, when the water begins to boil, remove the garlic cloves and remove any remaining skin, we also reserve it on absorbent paper. We already have it ready to be used in the preparation of the sauce, this will make all its flavor jump and it will fall better in our digestion.