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Walnut Pesto

Pesto is a beautiful sauce combining fresh basil, garlic and parmesan with a base of nuts and oil. Tangy and flavourful, if you need an excuse to grow some basil plants this is it! Pesto goes well on pizza or pasta and makes a great dip to serve with cheese and crackers. I use walnuts here but any nut can be used really – pine nuts are used in a lot of traditional recipes. Lightly toast the nuts first by tossing them in a pan over low-medium heat until just starting to change colour. Pine nuts burn very easily and taste awful when burnt, so keep an eye on them. A food processor works well but I like using a mortar and pestle – after all the words pesto and pestle share a root word. If a food processor is used I suggest blending cheese and nuts first until the consistency of bread crumbs, then adding oil and lemon juice and finally the basil, pulsing until the basil is in small pieces – don’t take it so far that there’s no specks of basil left.

Depending on the ingredients on hand flat leaf parsley can also be added. Lemon is not completely traditional but I like the extra kick of flavour, and it makes up for not using as much raw garlic as some recipes.

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Ingredients

  • 1-3 cloves of garlic, to taste
  • 1 chunk of parmesan or grana padano cheese, around 50g/2 oz
  • a handful of toasted walnuts, pine nuts or other neutral flavoured nuts.
  • 1/3 cup good olive oil
  • juice of half a lemon
  • 1 good bunch of fresh basil
  • salt

Method

Pick basil leaves off any large stems. Dice or grate the cheese. Add a pinch of salt, nuts, garlic, cheese and basil to a large mortar.

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Start pounding and stirring until the ingredients are fairly well broken down and mixed together.

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Add olive oil and lemon juice and continue to mix. until the mixture is fairly smooth.

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Fresh Tomato Pizza Sauce

When tomatoes are in season it’s nice to make a pizza sauce with good, ripe freshly picked ones. There’s maybe less of the rich cooked tomato flavour  in the sauce, but more fresh, zingy flavour.  I like to use fresh herbs in fresh tomato sauce – thyme in particular.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Drop in a few tomatoes at a time and cook until the skins start to crack, or feel loose when prodded with a spatula. Remove the tomatoes to a strainer and repeat until all tomatoes are cooked.

Simmered tomatoes, ready to be pulped

I use a tomato mill as detailed here to remove the seeds and skins. A mouli/food mill can also be used. If none of these tools are available just peel the skins off by hand and mash or blend the tomatoes. The sauce at this point tastes amazing (if you made lots, try splashing a little onto some spaghetti for a snack!) but it might be too runny to use for pizza sauce. It can be thickened either by simmering over medium heat until thick or just straining the pulp through a sieve, which works surprisingly well! If you sieve the pulp, save the runny juice for soups or something.

Separating the tomato pulp from the juice

 

Add fresh herbs and a little salt to taste before using on pizza. This sauce can also be preserved in jars or bottles.

 

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Basic Pizza Sauce From Tinned Tomatoes

Some people like a rich sauce with herbs and garlic, some like an ultra simple sauce with nothing but tomato – the DOC standard (which dictates how traditional Italian pizza is made)  is to use nothing but crushed tinned San Marzano tomatoes. There’s a lot of opinions about what makes a good pizza sauce and of course no one recipe to rule them all – if it tastes good to you, then it’s ‘right’ (unless you simply must have a DOC pizza of course…). For me a fairly simple sauce with just a hint of extra herbs is best, a good burst of tomato acidity and sweetness that still lets the other ingredients shine through.

  •  1 Tin of good tomatoes, preferably skinned whole tomatoes. San Marzano are traditional but there’s good and bad brands like everything else. A good tin of generic plum tomatoes is much nicer than a bad tin of San Marzanos. If you make pasta or pizza sauce regularly it is worth buying a few different brands that are easy to find in your area and comparing them to find the nicest.
  • 1 generous pinch of dried oregano – the good stuff is sometimes sold as ‘Mediterranean oregano’, an olive/tan colour with a pungent aroma from the dried flowers.
  • 1 generous pinch of salt

Tip all ingredients into a bowl and use a stick blender to briefly pulse and break up the whole tomatoes. Don’t overdo the blending – a little texture in the sauce is nice. If you don’t want to use a blender, use kitchen scissors to snip the whole tomatoes into pieces or just squish them with a spatula or even with bare hands.  Good tinned tomatoes shouldn’t taste bitter but if yours do, add a little pinch of sugar to the sauce for balance. You might also find that the taste of some tinned tomatoes is a little dull or flat – in this case 1 tsp of lemon juice can give a lift.