Amazing red pepper pesto sauce
Pesto is one of our favourite pasta sauces… maybe right after carbonara. The recipe that we are showing you today is a very special “twist” to this very traditional dish, adding some red peppers.
This ingredient provides a lightly sweet touch to the sauce that goes incredibly well, and allows us to not only achieve a delicious flavour, but also a silky and beautiful sauce.
We suggest you optionally add some parmesan cheese at the end, but for a 100% vegan option you can skip this step and you will see it is still marvellous.
We hope you like it.
Red Pepper Pesto
What do you say if we make things more interesting changing the well-known pesto sauce? Our simple and delicious proposal with red peppers will surprise you and become a must at home.
Ingredients
- 1 big red pepper bell or romano
- olive oil
- 1 clove garlic
- 25 g basil
- 3 tablespoons pine nuts
- 160 g pasta
- salt to taste
- water to cook the pasta
Instructions
- Firstly, we are going to roast and grill our peppers.To do so, we firstly pre-heat our oven to 200 °C (or 392 °F), cut the peppers into strips and we place them inside on a tray with a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt.If your oven has a grill option, we turn it on as well.Whilst the peppers are cooking, we peel the garlic and wash the basil.
- We leave the peppers in the oven until they have lose a big amount of water and are getting slightly charred. Then, we take them out.This process took 30 minutes in our oven at 200 °C (or 392 °F).In a big pot, we add water to boil the pasta.
- Whilst the peppers are cooling down a bit, we toast the pine nuts on a pan at medium heat, moving them constantly until they get a light-brown colour. Then we remove them from the heat and reserve.When the water in the pot is boiling, add the water and continue with the next step making sure we keep an eye to remove the pasta from the water when ready. Reserve a cup of pasta water for the sauce (we probably will not need all of it).
- Now it is time to make the sauce. To do this we need to mix the pepper, basil, garlic and oil very well. You can reserve a few basil leaves for decorating later.With the help of a hand blender, we blend all the ingredients mentioned above very well until quite homogeneous.Add some pasta water to the mixture and keep blending. The water will help getting a less dense sauce as well as create a more homogeneous liquid. Little by little add water until you get the right consistency blending very well all the time.Add salt to taste keeping in mind that if you are adding parmesan later, it is already a bit salty.
- When the sauce is ready, in a pan or another recipient mix it very well with the pasta.Add the roasted pine nuts.
- Y… That’s it! Now you can decorate it with some basil leave and add some parmesan cheese if you wish. We hope you like it.
Notes
If you can get the Spanish variety of red peppers called “piquillo”, even better.