Basil Pesto
Pesto alla genovese
Pesto alla genovese — from pestare, to pound, for the mortar.
Basil, pine nuts, garlic and cheese pounded to a coarse sauce, kept cold throughout so the leaves stay green instead of bruising brown.
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 5 min
- Total
- 25 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 5
Allergens
- Milk
- Nuts
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Method
Pick the basil leaves off the stalks and wash them only if they need it.
Dry them completely, in a salad spinner or between two tea towels, until no water beads on a leaf. Water thins the sauce and stops the oil holding.
Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan over medium-low heat for 3-4 minutes, shaking the pan constantly.
Stop when they smell nutty and are patched pale gold. They go from pale to burnt inside a minute at the end, and one scorched batch is bitter through the whole jar.
Tip them onto a cold plate and cool them completely.
Pound the garlic clove with the coarse salt in a mortar until it is a smooth paste. The salt crystals are the abrasive, which is why they go in with the garlic rather than at the end.
Add the cooled pine nuts and pound them to a rough paste.
Add the basil a small handful at a time, grinding it against the side of the mortar in a circular motion rather than hammering straight down.
Grind rather than chop or hammer. Bruised basil oxidises and blackens at the cut edges within minutes, and the sauce goes from bright green to army green while you are still making it.
Work in the grated parmesan and pecorino.
Stir the olive oil in by hand at the end rather than pounding it in.
If you use a food processor instead, chill the bowl and the blade, pulse in short bursts, keep the oil out until the very end and stop while it is still coarse. A machine run continuously heats the paste through friction, which is the fastest route to a dark, bitter pesto.
Taste it. It should be assertive on its own, since it will be spread thin across pasta or stirred into a pan of soup.
Never cook it. Stir it into hot pasta off the heat, loosened with a ladle of the starchy cooking water that the cacio e pepe in this collection explains, or into a bowl of the minestrone at the table. Boiled, it goes khaki and the raw garlic turns harsh.
Scrape it into a small jar and level the top.
Pour a film of olive oil over the surface, which keeps the air off and holds the colour.
Keep the jar in the fridge and use it within four days.
Keep it in the fridge and never in a cupboard, oil film or no oil film. Oil is not a preservative: raw garlic held under oil at room temperature is exactly the airless, low-acid condition Clostridium botulinum needs, and a jar of pesto is not an acidified preserve.
Freeze whatever will not be used within the week in an ice-cube tray, for up to three months.
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What to expect
- Taste
Bright, herbaceous and assertive, with basil's peppery, faintly aniseed character at the centre, a rounding richness from the toasted pine nuts, and a sharp, salty depth from the two cheeses that keeps the whole thing from tasting purely of raw herb.
- Aroma
Fresh, sharp basil first, warm and nutty from the toasted pine nuts, with the two cheeses' savoury edge rising as they are worked in.
- Texture
Distinctly coarse rather than a fine paste, with small, identifiable pieces of pine nut and basil leaf still present.
- Sound
The steady, grinding sound of a pestle worked against a mortar, rather than the whir of a blade.
- How the flavour moves
Basil's sharp, peppery character arrives first, garlic's warmth and the pine nuts' richness build through the middle, and the two cheeses' salty depth is what lingers longest at the finish.
- Serve it
Served at room temperature, folded into something hot rather than heated itself.
- Goes with
Trofie or trenette pasta in the traditional Ligurian style, alongside potatoes and green beans cooked in the same pot, or stirred into minestrone.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy, though the details of temperature control genuinely change the result.
- Cost
Moderate — pine nuts and two cheeses are the main cost.
- Equipment
A mortar and pestle, ideally; a food processor works with care.
- When to make it
Any time fresh basil is at its best, typically summer, though it can be made year round with good imported basil.
- Best season
Basil is at its best in summer, though good-quality basil is available for much of the year from most supermarkets.
- You know it is done when
The pine nuts should be patched pale gold rather than uniformly dark; the finished pesto should be a bright, vivid green, coarse rather than perfectly smooth, with visible flecks of nut and cheese throughout.
- And it feels like
Coarse and slightly textured rather than a completely smooth paste — it should be assertive enough to hold its own once spread thin across pasta or stirred into a large pan of soup.
- Food safety
No particular hazard; standard care with fresh herbs and dairy.
- Where it goes wrong
- Using a food processor run continuously rather than in short, cold bursts, which heats the paste through friction and turns it dark and bitter.
- Blending in the olive oil rather than stirring it in by hand, which can release bitter compounds from sheared oil.
- Not drying the basil properly before grinding it, leaving a thinner, wetter sauce.
- Burning the pine nuts while toasting them, which turns the whole batch bitter.
- If it does go wrong
Dark, bitter pesto: it was made too hot, either from over-processing in a machine or from oil that was sheared rather than stirred in. Thin, watery pesto: the basil was not dried properly before grinding. Grainy, ungrained pine nuts: they need more pounding or a longer pulse in the processor before the basil goes in.
- Making it ahead
Keeps well for about a week in the fridge under a layer of oil, and freezes well without the cheese, which is better added fresh after thawing.
- Keeping it
Keeps for about a week refrigerated in a sealed jar, provided a thin layer of olive oil is poured over the surface to exclude air.
- Reheating
Not heated directly — it is folded into something already hot rather than warmed on its own, since sustained heat dulls its colour and flavour.
- Freezing
Freezes well, ideally without the cheese added, which can be stirred in fresh after thawing.
- Leftovers
Good well beyond pasta — stirred into soup, spread on bread, or spooned over potatoes and green beans in the traditional Ligurian style.
- Scaling it
Scales up easily, though a mortar becomes impractical for very large batches and a chilled food processor bowl is the more realistic choice at scale.
- Substitutions
Pine nuts have no close substitute for their particular soft, buttery richness, though walnuts are sometimes used as a cheaper alternative with a noticeably different, more assertive flavour. Parmigiano Reggiano is made with animal rennet and is not vegetarian; a vegetarian hard cheese can replace it where that matters.
- Dietary swaps
Contains milk and nuts. Vegetarian only if a rennet-free hard cheese is used in place of parmesan; not suitable for a nut allergy.
- Shopping for it
Fresh, young basil and a genuine Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano make a considerably better sauce than older basil or a pre-grated, anti-caking-agent cheese.
- Keeping the cost down
Walnuts can replace pine nuts at a fraction of the cost, though the flavour is noticeably more assertive and less delicately buttery.
- Nutrition
A calorie-dense sauce given the olive oil, pine nuts and cheese, though used in small quantities relative to a full plate of pasta.
- Worth it?
A sauce whose reputation as simple hides how much technique actually goes into keeping it bright rather than letting it turn dark and bitter.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Liguria, Italy, centred on Genoa.
- Also called
Pesto alla genovese.
- Said out loud
PES-toh AH-lah jeh-noh-VEH-zeh.
- What the name means
Pesto comes from pestare, to pound, the same root as pestle — describing the method rather than any ingredient.
- History
Pounded herb-and-oil sauces have a long history across the Mediterranean with no single traceable point of invention. The earliest known printed recipe specifically under the name pesto appears in Giovanni Battista Ratto's La Cuciniera Genovese, published in Genoa in 1863. The sauce spread well beyond Liguria in the second half of the 20th century, and the widely available jarred version followed close behind that international spread.
- Why it matters
The defining sauce of Ligurian cooking, closely tied to Genoa specifically, and now one of the most recognised and widely eaten Italian sauces in the world.
- When it is eaten
Everyday Ligurian home cooking, traditionally paired with trofie or trenette pasta alongside boiled potatoes and green beans in the same dish.
- The traditional way
Cold pounding in a mortar rather than blending, with the oil worked in by hand at the very end rather than blitzed in with everything else.
- How it changed
Widespread jarred, commercially produced pesto is typically pasteurised and made with cheaper oils and nuts, giving a flatter, less vivid version of the fresh, cold-pounded sauce.
- Regional variations
Ligurian basil is traditionally picked small, since larger, more mature leaves carry more of the compounds that give a stronger, minty, camphorous edge some cooks consider less desirable.
- Sources and credit
No individual is credited with inventing pesto; the earliest documented printed recipe under the name belongs to Giovanni Battista Ratto's 1863 cookery book, though the sauce itself almost certainly predates that in home cooking.
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