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
Zanthoxylum piperitum the aroma. The young leaves are crushed and blended with miso using "suribachi" (mortar) to make a paste, a pesto sauce of sorts, and then used to make various "aemono" (tossed salad). The stereotypical main ingredient for the resultant "kinome-ae" is the fresh harvest of bamboo shoots, but the sauce may be tossed (or delicately "folded") into sashimi, clams, squid or other vegetable such as "tara-no-me" (angelica-tree shoots). The immature green berries, blanched and salted, are called "ao-zanshō" (). The berries are traditionally simmered into dark-brown "tsukudani", but nowadays are also available as "shoyu-zuke", which is just steeped in soy