Pesto (see pine mouth). Many online recipes in English for pesto will also list black pepper among the ingredients, which the traditional Genoese recipe omits. Pesto Pesto (; ), sometimes spelled as pasto or to refer to the original dish pesto alla genovese (), is a sauce originating in Genoa, the capital city of Liguria, Italy. It traditionally consists of crushed garlic, European pine nuts, coarse salt, basil leaves, Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parmesan cheese) and pecorino sardo (cheese made from sheep's milk), all blended with olive oil. The name is the past participle of the Genoese verb "pestâ" (Italian: "pestare"), which means "to
XO sauce XO sauce XO sauce is a spicy seafood sauce from Hong Kong. It is commonly used in southern Chinese regions like Guangdong province. Developed in the 1980s in Hong Kong for Cantonese cuisine, XO sauce is made of roughly chopped dried seafoods, including dried scallops ("conpoy"), fish, and shrimp, which are cooked with chili peppers, onions, and garlic. This dried seafood-based sauce resembles the Fujianese Shacha sauce. Spring Moon, the Chinese restaurant of the Peninsula Hong Kong hotel, is often credited with the invention of XO sauce, although others claim it came from Kowloon. The name "XO sauce" comes from