The Key to This Creamy, Thick Pesto? A Mortar and Pestle

'Throughout my time working in restaurants, I developed an illogical dread of some basic kitchen tasks. None of them — picking and chopping parsley, peeling and mincing garlic, browning pans of ground meat — were particularly difficult. But at the scale required in a professional kitchen, they felt Sisyphean. And even though it has been years since I worked in a restaurant and I now cook for one, two, sometimes maybe eight, rather than 100, the dread still plagues me. But once I get going, I am a goldfish, invariably surprised that chopping, browning or peeling for a handful of people takes barely any time.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle. The chefs who taught me to cook worshiped the tool, and I learned to make everything from mayonnaise and guacamole to masala and bread crumbs using it. But despite loving how empowering it was to be liberated from electric appliances, pounding bunches of basil, heaps of pine nuts and a dozen cloves of garlic in a mortar to make a gallon of pesto felt like torture, or maybe a weird hazing. Even that simple recipe could take all afternoon, because the bowl’s limited capacity meant I had to thump multiple batches of nuts and herbs. I was left with a splattered apron and a very sore arm.

Even after I left the restaurant, I dreaded making pesto — which means “pounded” in Italian — in the traditional manner. Over the years, I tweaked my method in an attempt to speed up the process. I pounded the nuts in the mortar, but I made a basil-garlic oil in a blender, and then combined both in a bowl with plentiful grated cheese. Or sometimes I just dumped all the ingredients into my mini food processor and blasted the living daylights out of them, ignoring my better knowledge that extended blending would oxidize the fragile basil and the machine’s tiny blades would never properly break down the nuts.

But then last year I traveled to Liguria, a northwestern region of Italy, to document the olive raccolta, or harvest, for my television series. Smooth, sweet and buttery, Ligurian olive oil barely resembles its more typically exported Tuscan cousin, which tends to be grassy and peppery. And because I was going all the way to Liguria, the proud birthplace of basil pesto, I wanted a lesson with a lifelong pounder to see if I could come to understand why pounding is unequivocally superior to blending. A friend nominated her mother-in-law, Lidia Caveri, who offered to host me at her family home in Moneglia, a tiny coastal village in an area best known for its olive oil and beaches. . .

She started with a handful of pine nuts, left raw to preserve the faint sweetness that recedes with toasting. With the kind of elegance only a chic Italian grandmother can lend to bashing small, slippery nuts, she pounded them into a paste that resembled a pale, creamy peanut butter. Then she added a couple handfuls of tender Genovese basil leaves, a clove of garlic and some coarse salt to provide the friction needed to break everything down.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/magazine/pesto-italy-mortar-pestle.html?