The walnut sauce, as famous as pesto, is a typical Ligurian condiment made with walnuts, garlic, oil, and stale bread.
It is a very simple preparation but requires some patience in certain preparation steps.
In Ligurian tradition, walnut sauce (in Ligurian “sarsa de noxe“) is used to season Pansotti (see photo below), a typical stuffed pasta similar to ravioli, which does not contain meat and is therefore considered a lean dish. For this reason, it was once considered the right recipe to prepare during Lent.
Like Genoese Pesto, it should not be heated when used but simply thinned with a bit of hot pasta water, mixing and adding butter and parmesan to taste.
Many take shortcuts and make it by blending walnuts, cream (which absolutely should not be used!) and parmesan, but in doing so they lose the authentic essence of this raw condiment.
This sauce is still traditionally made with an olive wood mortar, an ancient tool that allows the walnut kernels to be crushed to release their maximum flavor and give the sauce a warmer note.
The true walnut sauce is a recovery recipe: it binds with dry bread soaked in milk, and never uses butter or cream.
- Difficulty: Medium
- Cost: Moderate
- Preparation time: 10 Minutes
- Portions: 4 people
- Cooking methods: No cooking
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: All seasons
Ingredients
- 7 oz walnuts
- A few cloves garlic
- 2 oz stale bread crumbs
- 1 1/4 cups whole milk
- to taste marjoram (optional)
- to taste extra virgin olive oil
- to taste salt
Tools
- 1 Mortar olive wood
Preparation
First, bring water to a boil in a high-sided pot. As soon as it boils, pour in the walnut kernels and leave them in for about 5 minutes. This way, you can remove the skin from the walnuts (the skin should not be removed if you want to enjoy that bittersweet taste that is part of the tradition of this recipe).
Drain the walnut kernels using a colander and place them on a clean cloth. Dry them and let them cool. In the meantime, place the bread crumbs in a bowl with the milk. Mix well so that the bread can soak, collecting the excess milk to use at the final stage.
Combine the walnuts in the mortar with garlic, salt, and bread crumbs (and marjoram).
Work the sauce, gradually adding the oil and reserved milk until you achieve a smooth cream.
Here is a photo of the classic Pansotti with walnut sauce;
To easily crush the walnuts, here is the perfect tool: Westmark Nussprofi Deluxe Sieger 33264470 nutcracker in Metal–
