How to serve pasta with pesto sauce in traditional way?
We already altogether passed through the preparation of the original pesto sauce recipe. Now it is time to use that pesto sauce in the right and traditional way. This is how they serve it traditionally in Italy.
components
- 400 gr pasta (trenette, trofie, fettuccine, linguine or spaghetti)
- 200 gr pesto sauce
- Parmesan for decoration
- cherry tomato for decoration (my case)
- basil leaves for decoration
- olive oil
Instruction
- Cook the appropriate paste in accordance with the instructions from the packaging.
- Transfer the cooked pasta into a separate (for serving) dish, and keep a spoon or two water in which the pasta was cooked.
- Add a pesto sauce and combine all together manually.
- If you feel that the pesto sauce is quite thick, feel free to add a spoon or two water (from the pot where you cooked the pasta).
- Serve with chopped basil leaves, cherry tomato, parmesan cheese and sprinkle with olive oil.
Pasta with pesto sauce in a traditional way
Pesto already did.
Now, I need the right shape of pasta.
Picture from internet
In Liguria (the region of Italy, where the city of Genoa is located), two types of pasta are traditionally used in combination with pesto sauce: Trofie and Trenette.
Trofie is a short, thin and spiral pasta, originally from Liguria.
Trenette that looks pretty much like linguine and linguine looks like fettuccine … all together like tagliatelle. The difference is a bit in the thickness and the shape.
Picture from internet
But if you can find Trenette substitute as Linguini, Fettuccine and Tagliatelle are the best options.
Even the spaghetti …you will not feel the difference.
The best pasta is homemade pasta.
But that requires lots of times, especially if you are not in training. Because of that, a good option is pasta already made, and dried one, from the grocery stores.
I didn’t use my brain so much for cooking pasta. Left it all to the instructions on the back side of pasta packaging. I turned on all the measurement equipment.
And it was done in the end „al dente“ 🙂
Relevant and irrelevant
Irrelevant is the shape of pasta, but pasta cooking time is very important.
The most important
Do not cook pesto sauce! Add pesto sauce away from the heat. 
Serving
Traditional and the most famous serving option is only pasta combined with pesto sauce and decorated with pine nuts and sprinkled with olive oil.
One very mysterious option exists, mysterious because nobody knows where it comes from. I would rather say a double combination of carbohydrates. The same way as when you eat bread and pasta together in the same meal. Maybe someone likes it, but I…do not.
In the same region, you will find pasta with pesto sauce combined with potato and green beans. Yes, potato and paste in the same dish. OMG!
Thereby it has to be cooked all together in the same pot, both water and pasta. Pesto sauce is at the end when is serving time. All pasta and potato and green beans have to be combined with pesto and decorated with basil, pine nuts, and olive oil.
I was a little bit inspired, so I put everything that came to my mind 🙂 Sure, you don’t have to do it on that way 🙂 Sometimes less is more 🙂
I put cherry tomato, parmesan….and added some green color…insted od basil which I finished for pesto sauce I used a rocket. And voila almost as ORIGINAL 🙂
What else you can or can not do?
- If you are making minestrone soup, put a little bit of pesto sauce instead of tomato sauce 🙂
- Do not put pesto sauce on the pizza and do not bake them together in the oven. 🙂
