Speaking of local food in Cinque Terre, one of the most prominent local foods in this region is pesto. Cinque Terre is located in the Ligurian region of Italy which has the perfect climate for growing basil, thus it is the birthplace of pesto. During our stay in Cinque Terre, we had a pesto making demonstration from the owner of our hotel named Felicita, who also ran the restaurant.
We had a group dinner one night that included...of course...pesto lasagna.
Felicita explained that the best basil leaves come from Sardinia in the Mediterranean (second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily.) She uses leaves that are medium in size.
She also uses sheep cheese because it is not as strong.
She uses a morter and pestle to ground all the ingredients together because she says the blades of a food processor burns the leaves. Marble is always cold so she uses a wooden pestle instead of marble to grind the ingredients.
I'm not sure how she made enough pesto for a whole restaurant or even enough to feed us our meal that evening because it seems it would take a long time to make enough pesto this way. But this is how she demonstrated it to us. Below is her pesto recipe:
Makes 2 servings
80 basil leaves
1 garlic clove
2 Tbsp. pine nuts
parmesan cheese, grated (she said she uses 1 Tablespoon per serving)
1. Wash basil leaves and dry on a tea towel.
2. Crush basil with morter and pestle
3. Add 1 garlic, grind
4. Add pine nuts, gind
5. Mix with 2 heaping Tablespoons parmesan cheese, grated
6. Add olive oil until creamy consistency
Have a good meal! Felicita
Or you can use my recipe that makes a larger volume but then I "burn the basil leaves" with my food processor. I'm sorry.
Here is her recipe for Pesto Lasagna
Makes 6 servings
100 grams of flour (7/8 cup)
100 grams of butter (7 Tbsp)
1 liter milk (4 cups)
a bit of salt
80 grams of powdered parmesan cheese (5/8 cup or 2.8 oz) I think powdered is like finely grated parmesan cheese
lasagna noodles
1. In one pan, heat butter, flour, salt and stir together for 5 minutes.
2. Then add milk on medium heat, add powdered parmesan cheese and mix parmesan and sauce
3. Place in one pan a first layer of besciamella sauce (above sauce), then a layer of lasagne and alternate with lasagna and besciamella sauce for five layers.
4. Cover the last layer with besciamella.
5. Bake in oven at 160 degrees for 40 minutes
6. When you take the pan out of the oven, you can put pesto sauce on top or can use bolognese sauce.
Have a good meal! Felicita
For our meal, we had this pesto lasagna for the first course and Felicita's husband came around to offer seconds and thirds if we wanted.
Second course was a local fish and some greens. (with seconds or thirds, if we desired)
and dessert was like a strawberry cheesecake.
But we still weren't done. The husband then brought around an after-dinner liquor called sciacchettra. We've never had such service at any meal yet! The courses (and seconds) just kept coming.
This evening called for a toast to such wonderful hosts. They showed us how to make pesto, along with samples, served us multiple portions of pesto lasagna, multiple portions of a delicious local fish with greens, dessert and an after-dinner drink. Cheers to the wonderful locals of Cinque Terre! This was one of our most enjoyable evenings yet.
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