Try our aromatic trenette al pesto recipe – the dish made famous by Disney Pixar’s Luca – for a feast fit for the Italian Riviera. This dish comes from Genoa, the capital of Liguria, an area renowned for its basil and fresh pesto sauce.
Trenette is a flat, narrow pasta and stems from the word trena, meaning string in Genoese. The pasta itself closely resembles linguine, but actually has a more rounded shape, which offers greater adherence to sauces and allows it to better transmit the rich aromatic taste of Genovese pesto. Ligurian tradition demands that the trenette are boiled together with diced potatoes and sliced green beans, which makes the dish both easy to prepare and a hearty addition to any home cook’s repertoire.
Our Trenette al Pesto recipe
Serves 4
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Calories per serving: 468kcal
Ingredients
- 500g trenette or linguine pasta
- 100g green beans, cut into 3cm pieces
- 1 large potato, peeled and cut into small pieces
- 50g fresh basil
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 pinch coarse sea salt
- 2 tbsp Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
- 2 tbsp grated pecorino cheese
- 30g pine nuts
- 100ml extra-virgin olive oil
Method
- Put the basil and garlic in a blender, together with the pine nuts, and a pinch of sea salt. Blend for 1-2 seconds and then add the pecorino, parmesan, and some olive oil, a little bit at a time. Continue to add the olive oil until there's none left, at which point the pesto should have a creamy consistency.
- Bring your pasta water to a boil and salt the pot well. Add your trenette as well as the green beans and the potato. Drain the pasta once is cooked al dente, but ensure to reserve some pasta water for the sauce.
- Transfer your trenette to a mixing bowl, along with the vegetables and pesto. Mix until the sauce is evenly distributed. Plate with some more basil and a sprinkling of pine nuts. Buon appetito!
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