Pesto Genovese is actually one of the easiest and healthiest sauces you can make for your spaghetti. Provided you have the basil (I always have some plants in pots), it’s a sauce you don’t boil, you don’t fry and it doesn’t fail! All you need is your food processor.

I have tried many times to put too many basil leaves into this recipe. I never made it; they were never TOO many! This makes it difficult to calculate the amount of basil needed for a pesto sauce, but since you can never fail, you should immediately take advantage of your blender…

Laziness Factor: 1

[where 0 is watering a plant and 4 is waiting for a plant you just planted to cast a shadow on you]

 

Ingredients for 4-5 servings:

– 500g spaghetti

– 30-50 basil leaves

– 3 garlic cloves

– 15-20 pine nuts (optional)

– 50-100ml olive oil

– salt and pepper

1.

Put a pot of water to a boil and start cooking the spaghetti as indicated.

2.

Cut off a handful of (30-50) basil leaves and put them in the food processor.

 

3.

Peel and add the garlic cloves, add salt and some olive oil as well.

 

4.

If the oil you added at first wasn’t enough for the mix to form a paste, add some more, until your sauce looks like in the photo.

 

5.

A minute before draining the spaghetti keep some of the boiling water into a bowl. This water contains starch and we are going to use it as a sticky medium.

 

6.

Drain the spaghetti and, in the empty pot, pour the content of the food processor and some of the boiling water. The sauce should be dense enough, so don’t add too much water.

 

7.

Normally, a pesto genovese contains pine nuts and parmesan, but this is the easy version, so I added any other hard cheese and skipped the pine nuts.

 

8.

This is a dish to devour. Bon appetit!

 

Here is a video version of this recipe:

[gdpr_preferences text=”Privacy Preferences”]

Delete Form
[gdpr_request_form type=”delete”]

Rectify Form
[gdpr_request_form type=”rectify”]

Complaint
[gdpr_request_form type=”complaint”]

Export Data
[gdpr_request_form type=”export-data”]

What is LazyPasta.com?

Lazy Pasta is the page to explore the world's collection of easy pasta recipes - and then some more elaborate ones. As our life has become faster, you can also try our quick recipes that use favourite pasta types like spaghetti, lasagne, fusilli and rigatoni, that are combined to create simple pasta dishes.

All the Lazy Pasta recipes are presented in photos, which guide through the step-by-step process, and they all end up with their respective pasta recipe video.

Categories of pasta recipes

Lazy Pasta recipes are divided into categories: there are vegetarian pasta recipes, pasta recipes with meat, pasta recipes with seafood and fish, pasta salads, pasta soups and recipes with baked pasta.

The recipe presented above is Easy Spaghetti al Pesto Genovese and it belongs to the Vegetarian Pasta Recipes category.

Why pasta?

Pasta is a great ingredient for quick and delicious dishes. Perfect pasta dishes don't always have to be hard to prepare. According to Lazy Pasta there is "an easy pasta recipe for every human on the planet".

Although it's hard to tell which country pasta originates from (whether it's Italy or China), the history of pasta is long and interesting.

Truth be told, pasta has become popular as an ingredient of the Italian cuisine and it forms part of the Mediterranean diet. Pasta dishes can be ordered and devoured in various Italian restaurants all around the world.

The secret of the pasta may lie in its simplicity. It is usually made of white flour or wheat flour, but today we also have the options of whole wheat pasta and, more recently, gluten-free pasta.

Then again, the list of ingredients that can be used in a pasta recipe is endless; The sauce can be anything for a simple tomato sauce to bechamel sauce, white sauce with cream or other dressings. Garlics and onions are great friends of pasta, vegetables and other greens like parsley, dill, spinach, zucchini, peppers, broccoli and mint can be found in various recipes, while cheese is an absolute ticket to success, either grated, sliced or baked on top.

No matter how elaborate a pasta recipe is, the result can be mouth-watering and is certain to please everyone's palate.