♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - If you're like me, you're probably sick and tired of the same old two or three pasta sauces you make over and over again.

So, today on Milk Street, we're going to give you three new recipes.

We're starting with a pesto alla Genovese with basil, but it's made entirely differently than the way you used to make it.

Then we traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to find out how to make a fried cherry tomato with coarsely chopped pistachios.

And finally, here in the States, we go down to Al Forno in Providence, Rhode Island, for a great recipe.

It's a pasta with fresh corn, tomatoes, and basil.

So stay tuned right here at Milk Street as we take a fresh look at pasta sauces.

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- You know, the Slow Food movement is alive and well in Italy, especially when it comes to making pesto alla Genovese, which, of course, is made with basil.

Now, we spent some time over there to understand how it really should be made.

There's a guy called Roberto Panizza, and he's very much part of the Slow Food movement.

In fact, he uses a 100-pound mortar and pestle-- the pestle is the size of a small baseball bat-- to make his authentic pesto.

Now, the order of ingredients is pretty interesting.

Garlic, then pine nuts, a little cheese, a whole bunch of basil.

It's really about the basil.

Then, finally, a little bit of olive oil at the end.

So this ends up being a fairly dry pesto, and you thin it out using the starchy cooking water from the pasta.

So let's go make an authentic pesto alla Genovese the Italian way.

♪ ♪ - If there's one Italian recipe we all think we can make, its pesto Genovese, which is a basil pesto, right?

I mean, it's not that hard, it's just a few ingredients, throw it in a food processor.

Well, as we just showed, we went Italy, we discovered, actually, that it's quite a different recipe.

I mean, it's the same ingredients but handled differently, and you get quite a different result.

So, let's take it in order.

- All right, Chris, well, like you said, it's a very simple recipe.

And like most simple recipes, that means that the ingredients and the technique are really important.

So the first thing we're going to do is get our pasta going.

Now, we have four quarts of salted water.

We added two tablespoons of kosher salt so that the pasta is seasoned really well.

And I have 12 ounces of pasta here.

And we want to cook that until it's just al dente.

So now we have to start with the pesto.

And one thing that we found made a huge difference was the order of operations in which we added our ingredients to the food processor.

Now, traditionally this is made in a really big mortar and pestle, and you have a ton of control over how you're breaking down those ingredients.

So, rather than throw everything in and blend it, we do it in a particular order in order to kind of mimic that same texture.

So, to start, I have one and three-quarter ounces of parmesan.

We also have an ounce of pecorino sardo.

Now, if you can't find that, you would want to use like a manchego would actually be a better substitute than, say, a pecorino romano, because that's going to be quite a bit saltier.

I'm going to break this up into kind of marble-sized pieces.

(churning) And then we want it actually the consistency of like wet sand.

I'm going to pulse it a few more times.

(pulsing) Now, this is the part where I would just want to dump everything in the food processor.

But we're going to control ourselves and not do that.

We're going to... - Now, in Italy, forgetting about the food processor, they also didn't dump everything in the mortar and pestle at one time, right?

- Right.

So, by mixing up the ingredients in different stages and then recombining them, you can control how much water is released from the basil, you can control the texture.

And it really is important to kind of break it into steps.

So I'm just going to transfer this to a little bowl.

All right, Chris, so now I'm going to add the pine nuts.

Now, a moment to talk about pine nuts.

They are delicious and rich, but because they're so fatty, they can actually go rancid pretty quick.

So you want to make sure that you keep them either in the refrigerator or in the freezer until you're ready to use them.

And we have just a quarter-cup of pine nuts here.

I have two cloves of garlic that we've just peeled and smashed, and three quarters of a teaspoon of kosher salt.

- I like that.

You should write an article called "A Word about Pine Nuts."

- (laughing): "A Word about Pine Nuts."

- By Catherine Smart.

(whirring) - So, Chris, we're looking for this to be the consistency of about peanut butter.

And depending on your food processor, that could take up to a minute.

You want to give it a good amount of time, and you may need to scrape down the bowl.

- I also think doing the nuts and the garlic together, at the beginning, I think it does a better job breaking the garlic down into a real paste, because you just threw everything in with a few cloves of garlic, it doesn't get evenly processed, right?

You have to eat those chunks of garlic in the pesto?

- That's right.

And you don't want to be doing all that processing at the end, Chris, because then you'll over-process the basil.

Now is when we're going to add the cheeses back in.

And we have a third of a cup of oil, but I'm only going to add about half of this extra virgin olive oil right now.

All right, Chris, so once we're at this point, where we have the cheese and the garlic and the nuts and everything all blended, the trick is you want to make sure that you have a nice wet mixture here that will actually stick to the sides of the bowl of the food processor.

That's how you know you have it blended to the right consistency.

So I'm going to ask you to actually roughly chop our basil, if you would.

We have... - You never asked me to do anything, I'm very excited.

- You looked a little bored.

- (laughing): I looked a little bored, yeah.

- So, we have five cups of basil here.

Now, the basil that we find is actually a little bit different than what you would find in Italy.

They tend to look for the most tender young leaves of the basil, and so it's easy to mash it up with mortar and pestle.

Because we have a little bit older basil that we're usually finding in the supermarket, we just give it a rough chop so that we can kind of gently blend it in the food processor.

So I'm going to add this just to incorporate.

We don't want this fully puréed, we just want it finely chopped and mixed into the nut mixture.

- We should say one other thing.

When you buy-- if you buy your basil at a supermarket, and you get it home and you open the container, and you close your eyes, and you don't smell anything?

Then you probably don't want to make pesto out of it.

Right?

- That's very true, Chris.

Now we're just going to add the rest of the oil and combine it, and then we'll be ready to go.

So, Chris, if you've ever gone to the grocery store and seen kind of, like, the sad pesto in the salad bar, usually has that big slick of oil on top, you can see that this is a bit drier, and that's exactly what we want.

It's really nice and creamy, and it looks really spreadable.

We're going to just let our pasta finish cooking.

I'm going to reserve a half a cup of that salted cooking water to finish our pasta, and then we'll come back and eat.

♪ ♪ - Okay, Chris, I'm going to pour in half of this half-cup of water, so we'll have a quarter-cup in the beginning and then if we need some more, we'll have more.

And then I'm going to put the cup of pesto, the whole thing, right on top.

Now, a lot of our recipes, we finish with some reserved water and mix over high heat to sort of absorb the sauce.

That's not what we want to do here.

We want to keep it really fresh and bright.

So you don't want to mix this until you're sitting at the table, or standing in our case, right about to eat.

And you can see, Chris, that starchy water starts to break it down.

- So instead of using a lot of olive oil at the beginning so you have this sort of loose pesto, what you're doing is creating sort of a dry pesto that's then thinned out with water, so the flavor of the basil and of the other ingredients comes out.

It's not just all about olive oil.

It's about basil, which is kind of the point of pesto Genovese.

- The star of the show.

- The star of the show.

- Absolutely.

Okay, so this looks great.

I'm going to serve it up.

And just in general, Chris, it's a great idea to always reserve some of that starchy cooking water, no matter what pasta recipe you're doing, because there's no better way to adjust the consistency of your sauce.

- I got a little more than you did, I noticed.

- Trying to be polite.

- You're so generous and polite, you know.

Mmm.

It tastes like basil and pine nuts and garlic and a little bit cheese.

- Chris, I love how fresh and bright the pasta is.

I feel like it tastes like summer no matter when you eat it.

- Poetic.

Catherine's a poet during the weekends.

(chuckling): That was a good summary.

So in order to figure out how to make a pesto Genovese, we went to Genoa to find out.

And it turns out it's all about the basil.

It's the star of the show.

Not too much olive oil.

Do things in just the right order.

Start with that garlic and the pine nuts to make sure it's processed properly.

Chop the basil coarsely so you don't have to process it in the food processor too much.

And, finally, use some of that pasta cooking water to thin it out.

So, again, the basil shines.

So, pesto Genovese done the Italian way.

♪ ♪ - You know, here at Milk Street, we love pasta dishes.

We travel in Sicily and Sardinia and all over Italy.

But this recipe we really love comes from Al Forno in Providence, Rhode Island, a restaurant we've been to many times.

And they use fresh corn to make a creamy pasta sauce, so we thought we'd do that now.

Or I thought-- you do it now.

- (laughs) This is a great recipe, because it is creamy without using cream, so it's much lighter and fresher.

I'm going to start with one pint of tomatoes.

You can use grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, and these are halved.

And I'm actually going to add half a teaspoon of salt, and we're actually going to just let them sit in the salt while we cook the rest of the dish.

And this draws out the moisture and concentrates the flavors.

Let's move on now to the star of our recipe, which is corn.

I have four cobs here that have been husked, and what I'm going to do that's different from what they do at Al Forno, we are going to actually grate this corn.

It releases all the creamy starch from the inside of the kernels.

And we're going to just go ahead and grate right into the bowl.

So you can see now what's resulting is this lovely, creamy mashed corn.

Normally, we would throw away the cob.

In this recipe, we're going to save the cob.

- I was hoping you weren't going to say that.

What are you going to save them for?

- We're going to make corn stock.

- Oh, okay.

- From the corn stalk.

- Really?

Okay.

- So we're going to finish grating all four of the cobs.

All right, so I'm going to leave our grated corn here for a second, and let's move over to two and a half quarts of boiling water here.

You get to do the heavy lifting and add a tablespoon of salt.

- At least I get something to do.

- (chuckles) - That's good.

- Now, I'm going to add our four corncobs into the water.

All right, we're going to let the corn cobs do their thing, and let's start building our sauce.

So, I have a skillet here.

I'm going to heat it to medium.

And we're going to add in two tablespoons of butter.

Salted, my favorite.

Just let that melt.

All right, I'm going to add two minced shallots.

I have one habanero chili that's been seeded and minced.

So you don't have to worry too much about the heat.

And we're going to add one teaspoon of salt.

Okay, and I'm going to add in our grated corn.

So we're going to cook that for five minutes, and then we'll come back and finish the rest of our sauce.

♪ ♪ - So, Chris, I have reserved a cup and a half of the corn stock.

So we're going to continue making our sauce.

I'm going to add a cup and a half of the stock.

We're going to cook this on medium low for ten to 15 minutes, so it reduces down.

And my test for it is running a spatula through it, and I want it to leave a trail.

We're going to move on to our pasta.

I have 12 ounces here of campanelle pasta, which are lovely, frilly little curls.

So, this is our corn stock.

We're going to use this water again, so efficient.

And in goes the pasta.

- Can we just comment, there isn't much water in the pot.

So, why is that?

- We're actually doing that on purpose to concentrate some of the flavors, because we're going to use some of that water back at the end into our dish.

- So there'll be more starch in the water, which brings the sauce together.

- Mm-hmm.

That's right.

So this is going to cook for nine minutes, so that it's al dente, and I'm going to reserve one cup of that cooking water.

♪ ♪ - So, Chris, our sauce has cooked for about 15 minutes.

Oh, there you go.

There's a trail, so that means it's done.

This is a good consistency.

Let's go ahead and add our cooked pasta.

- So this pasta is a little pre-al dente, right, because it's going to finish cooking in the sauce.

- That's right.

- So it's not quite al dente, it's even a little less cooked than that.

- It's an extra al dente.

- Extra al dente, yes.

- (laughs) Extra al dente.

- Fortissimo al dente.

- Yes, that's exactly right, Chris.

We are undercooking our pasta and letting it finish cooking in the sauce, so it really picks up lots of flavor.

I'm going to add a splash of our pasta-cooking water just to thin it out a tad.

We are ready to finish this, off the heat, with our last two tablespoons of butter.

And this is going to melt right into that hot pasta.

Remember our salted tomatoes from the beginning?

They're going to go right in.

Along with one cup of fresh basil that's been chopped.

I love this recipe because it's an anytime recipe, all year round.

It feels like I have summer on my plate.

I'm going to add a sprinkling of pepper.

And let's serve up some of this pasta with sweet corn, tomatoes, and basil.

Enjoy.

- Mmm.

You know, even after all the travel we've done in Italy, with unusual pestos we hadn't thought of or differ... the real puttanesca, for example, this is the most unusual combination of ingredients, and it's fabulous.

- The tomatoes have that lovely acidic tang, and then the creaminess and sweetness of the corn underneath.

- Mmm.

So, a simple recipe, campanelle pasta with sweet corn, basil, and tomato.

We salted the tomatoes to start, grated corn-- ears of corn.

Cooked the pasta in not that much water, so we could use that to sort of bind the sauce.

And, as we often do at Milk Street, we finish the pasta in the sauce itself, so the sauce and the pasta came together.

A little basil on top with a little pepper and salt.

So, a Tuesday night recipe you can make any night of the week.

It's simple, and it is absolutely delicious.

You know, Sicily is a fabulous place when it comes to food, especially because it combines some of the flavors of North Africa-- nuts, the sort of sweeter flavors-- with classic Italian cooking.

Now, one of the things they do really well is make all sorts of-- well, we'll call them pestos, but they're nut pestos.

They take about as much time as it takes to cook the pasta.

So we went to Sicily.

We traveled to the town of Syracuse, and we cooked with Doriana Jesualdi, and she made this incredible dish in about ten minutes.

She took cherry tomatoes, a little bit of olive oil, fried them in the oil, and added coarsely chopped pistachios.

So, let's make a pasta sauce the Milk Street way.

♪ ♪ - You know, the more we travel in Italy, the more we realize we don't know anything about Italian cooking.

Maybe you do, but... - Well... - But I always thought pesto was pine nuts and basil, it was Genovese, right?

So it turns out that pesto, there's thousands of them, or hundreds of them-- any kinds of nuts, like pistachio, any kind of herb you can put with that.

You can add tomatoes to it, not add tomatoes.

So, the creaminess, the nuts is just one element.

And that's, that's pesto, right?

- Absolutely.

I love this dish, in part because it takes moments to come together.

It actually comes together in the time it takes the pasta to boil.

We're going to add two tablespoons of kosher salt.

It's super... - To four quarts of water, or... - Yeah, to four quarts of water.

It's super important to really season your pasta water well, otherwise, the pasta is... it's not going to taste very good.

At this point, we're going to add 12 ounces of linguini.

Let's give that a stir.

Otherwise it really clumps together.

Using the tongs, you can really help separate the individual strands of pasta... - So we won't call you Captain Hook, we'll call you Captain Tong.

- (laughs) - You just have tongs, you'd be good.

- We're going to cook that pasta until it's just shy of al dente.

- So this means it's like two or three minutes shy of being cooked, right?

- Yep.

You want the outside to be tender, but when you take a bite of it, it's still going to be a little chalky at the core.

- Okay.

- And while that pasta cooks, we're going to make our sauce.

So, this is super simple.

We're going to add four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, to which we're going to add one pint of cherry tomatoes, halved.

We use cherry tomatoes a lot in our cooking because they're sweeter, they're more tender, the skins aren't tough, they don't get stuck in your teeth.

- And they actually have some flavor, which is... very different than whole big tomatoes, right?

- They do.

I mean, you can get supermarket cherry tomatoes pretty much any time of year, and they're going to have great flavor.

So we're going to cook those tomatoes.

It's about four to six minutes.

The pasta isn't quite ready yet, but when it is, I'm going to reserve two cups of that pasta water, because we're going to use that to finish building our sauce.

- Okay.

♪ ♪ - So, Chris, these tomatoes are looking great.

Our pasta is cooked.

It's not quite finished, because we're gonna finish it in the sauce.

So let's go ahead and finish making that sauce.

Here come the pistachios we talked about.

We're going to use a half cup of pistachios.

You want to get roasted pistachios.

It saves a step, and they'll have a richer, fuller flavor.

Just try and avoid salted, because then it's harder to control the salt amounts in the pasta.

Just want to make sure to chop them pretty finely, so that they coat the noodles rather than just sort of pool at the bottom of the bowl.

Okay, let's go ahead.

We're going to take about half of these, and we're going to add them directly to that pan.

So let's go ahead and stir that.

And it's looking really dry, but at this point, we're going to use the pasta water to form the basis of the sauce, and we're going to use it, one and a half cups of this.

We've saved two cups, but we may have to add a little more water at the end to thin it out.

- I get very excited when water is a key ingredient in a recipe.

I just love that.

- (chuckles) - Well, no, it does-- it doesn't obscure other flavors.

It's very inexpensive, but it's how most the world cooks.

Water is a key ingredient.

- Oh, absolutely.

And pasta water is such a valuable ingredient, because it's already, it's slightly thickened, so it's going to add some viscosity to that sauce, and it's seasoned.

It's got the salt in it, and it tastes a little of the pasta.

So we're going to add a half-teaspoon of kosher salt and quarter-teaspoon black pepper, and we're going to bring that up to a simmer.

And we just want to cook that until the tomatoes soften a little more.

It's about two minutes.

So, Chris, it's been about two minutes.

The tomatoes are looking great.

They've softened up.

The sauce has tightened a little, so let's go ahead and finish that pasta.

So, first of all, we're going to add our pasta right to the skillet there.

And, again, use tongs.

It's the best tool ever for doing this.

So let's stir that in a little.

And we're going to add one tablespoon of freshly grated lemon zest.

You get that combo, the citrus and the pistachios, a lot in southern Italian cooking.

Stir it in; you really want to make sure to disperse that lemon zest.

The pasta's going to finish absorbing that water and that flavorful sauce, and it's going to finish cooking through.

If you took your pasta all the way to al dente and then added it to the sauce... - It'd be overcooked.

- Yeah, then you'd end up with mush.

So, the herb for the sauce is mint, and we don't really think of mint a lot in Italian cooking, but mint's actually the most common herb used around the world.

- Was mint something that's used more in southern Italian cooking than it is in northern?

- For the most part, but you do find it throughout Italy.

It has that piercing flavor, really heightens dishes.

You know, when you're chopping fresh herbs, I like to just ball it up in a little tight ball, and then you can just chiffonade it very quickly and easily.

So let's give it one final stir here.

You can see that pasta's really soaked it all up.

- Mmm.

- And it's smelling great.

You can smell the lemon, the pistachios.

You know, Chris, one of the things I really love about this dish is it doesn't have aromatics in it.

It doesn't have onions, it doesn't have garlic, it doesn't have scallions, so the flavor's super clear and super bright.

So at this point, let's go ahead and add that mint.

Off heat, so it doesn't wilt too much.

And stir it in.

And Chris, if the pasta looks too dry, you can always add a little more of the pasta water.

I think it's looking pretty good.

- No, it looks good.

- So let's go ahead and plate that.

And garnish with our remaining pistachios.

- That does look rather appealing, I have to say.

- It looks great.

It couldn't have been simpler.

Get some tomatoes.

It is nice to finish it with a nice, bright, fruity olive oil.

And then it's always great with a little dusting of parmesan or pecorino romano.

- So is everything.

- Yes, that's true.

- Mmm.

Boy, is that good.

As you said, so many dishes start with onions, you know, scallions, garlic, sort of overpowering.

This is so different, it's fresh.

- There's a real clarity here.

- Yep.

- It's a lightness.

- You'd probably serve this for breakfast, too, you put an egg on it... - I would.

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

- Matt, breakfast for Matt is you put an egg on it, no matter what it is, right?

So Matt just did a very quick recipe for pasta with pistachios, tomatoes, and mint.

It comes from Sicily.

Very simple recipe, cooks and about as much time as the pasta does, maybe a little bit longer.

And the secret was to start with olive oil and tomatoes to make a nice sort of almost fried tomato sauce.

And then we added mint in at the end, and pistachios.

Very simple to do, and I think, has really a light, bright, taste to it.

None of that garlic and onions.

Very different way of thinking about pasta.

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- Since 1899, my family has shared our passion for everything that goes into our Mutti 100% Italian tomatoes.

Only tomatoes.

Only Mutti.

- Designed by cooks for cooks for over 100 years.

Cookware collection by Regal Ware.

Handcrafted in Wisconsin.

- The AccuSharp knife and tool sharpener, designed to safely sharpen knives in seconds.

AccuSharp: Keep your edge.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪