La petite biscotte Now in Munich…

Gnocchi with Pesto Rosso and Mozarella

Gnocchi is one of my favorite Italian dishes. Usually I eat them with just a little grated cheese and I don’t think that any type of sauce is necessary for them to taste good. It’s actually not easy to find a good sauce for Gnnochi and I’ve been searching for a long time :p For me usual pasta sauces (bolognese, basil pesto, carbonara etc.) were simply to heavy for a Gnocchi dish. Sometimes I ate them with a simple tomato sauce but my stomach isn’t always happy about that, so I continued the search and finally today I decided to try and make a Pesto Rosso.

I’m actually not quite sure if Pesto Rosso is a traditional Italian sauce. I didn’t find anything about it on Wikipedia. If you happen to know where Pesto Rosso comes from and if it’s used in traditional Italian cuisine, please leave a comment
The only thing I know is that I found two different types of recipes on the internet. One type involved a lot of olives and fresh thyme. The other type leaves out olives entirely and uses basil as herb. The latter is the type of pesto rosso I tried here in France before and that’s the one I tried to reproduce with this recipe. However I don’t know if this is the “original” recipe (should there be one).

Unfortunately I didn’t make the Gnocchi myself as the process is quite time consuming and requires some practice. But if you’d like to give it a shot check out this video.

Ingredients

For the pesto (recipe adapted from this site):

• 200g fresh, firm tomatoes
• 10 sun-dried tomatoes, drained of their oil
• 2 cloves of garlic (optional, I didn’t put any)
• 2 tablespoons of fresh basil, chopped
• 50g walnuts, chopped (you can also use 100g almonds)
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (the best you have)
• salt and pepper

Other than that:

• 500g of uncooked Gnocchi
• grated parmesan or mozarella cheese (optional)

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Preparation

1. If you are using almonds, cook them in some water for approximately 5-10 minutes. Drain the nuts, cool off with cold water and peel away their skin. If you are using walnuts you can omit this step.
2. Put the fresh tomatoes in a bowl and pour some hot water over them. Let them in the hot water for about 2 minutes, drain and remove their skin (should be easy now because of the hot water). Cut in cubes and put aside.
3. Roughly chop the dried tomatoes. Put aside.
4. If you are using garlic, chop finely.
5. Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan and add 3 teaspoons of salt.
6. Put the fresh and the dried tomatoes in a food processor. Add the nuts, the garlic and the basil. Turn on the processor on high speed while slowly adding the olive oil. Once all the olive oil is incorporated continue to process everything until you are happy with the texture. Personally I like it as smooth as possible, but that’s up to you.
7. At last add salt and pepper to taste.
8. Turn of the food processor and put the pesto rosso aside.
9. Cook the Gnocchi according to manufacturer’s instructions.
10. Drain them well and serve with 1-2 spoons of pesto rosso. Sprinkle with some grated cheese if you like.

Serves 3-4. If you have some pesto rosso left you can conserve it in the fridge for a couple of days. Some even say that it conserves for up to a month if covered with a film of olive oil but I’m a little sceptical about that. Enjoy