Sicilian Red Pesto: Make The Most of Summer's Fresh Tomatoes

plus a bonus recipe for Italian iced coffee - caffè shakerato and get to know our guest, the wonderful Valentina of l'Appetito!

Lolly Martyn

and

Valentina Solfrini

Aug 25, 2024

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Valentinas mouthwatering Sicilian red pesto penne pasta and photography Photo credit Valentina Solfrini

Ciao friends!

How’s your August wrapping up? Just in the past couple days, we’ve returned to our usual cooler nights here on Lake Como, making life in our very northern Italian, un-air-conditioned apartment bearable again. So is caffè shakerato. But I’ll miss summer all too soon when I have to start wearing socks and real shoes, and putting on a coat instead of just heading directly outside with bare shoulders and toes.

Even better news, there’s a bright, fresh breeze in this week’s foodletter… Valentina from l’appetito is joining us this week with a killer pasta condiment! If you’re not subscribed to her newsletter l’appetito yet, you’re missing out on stunning food and wine photography interwoven with authentic Italian recipes and family stories. For this special collaboration, I’m flipping up the order, letting Valentina lead off by introducing herself. Jump directly to her recipe here - or check out her latest post which pulls at every heart string, or this special post about her day at Relais de Camont with Kate Hill of The Camont Journals.

Valentina, photography teacher & cook with a penchant for greenery

‘My name is Valentina, or @Valentinahortus on instagram. Daughter and granddaughter of cooks, I am a food and wine photographer turned professional cook myself. Hailing from a small medieval Italian village on the Adriatic coast, and growing up with a mamma and nonna whose life revolved entirely around food, I based both my careers on the exploration of recipes and traditions from the Olive side of Europe. Throughout my career, I hosted food photography as well as cooking photography workshops in Italy, France and abroad. For years, I've been the Food Photography and Styling teacher at the Lorenzo De'Medici University in Florence.
‘L’Appetito’, my Substack newsletter, started as an exploration of old recipes I inherited from my family, found in old notebooks, classics of Mediterranean cooking, and in-depth tips and techniques for using ingredients from the mezzogiorno.
Recently, I moved to a small town in Occitania, the southwestern part of France, to manage the kitchen of a small Café as the local cheffe cuistot. Cutting vegetables allows for lots of time to think. Since then, I started peppering the newsletter with essays about life connected to food, small travel guides, the nostalgia element for Italian food, and navigating ingredients from the south of France (which is still, as they call it here in Occitan, the Miegjorn - the south).
This is a recipe I learned to love in France, where everyone is obsessed with tomato pestos and pestos in general. On my Substack, I shared a version with dried tomatoes that I’d make ‘fuori stagione’, while this is the more authentic Sicilian recipe, made with fresh, juicy, ripe tomatoes (for a full guide on navigating Italian and French tomatoes, here’s an article for you).
Since this is a recipe conceived in a place where summer temperatures easily reach (and surpass) 40 C, you can add this onto your hot pasta straight from the fridge if you make it in advance. It will thicken up in the fridge, and loosen up once it hits the hot pasta. The pesto might be thicker or looser depending on the kind of ricotta and tomatoes you use, as well as the amount of cheese. If the pesto turns out thicker, reserve 2-3 tablespoons of the pasta water when mixing it with the pasta, though you’ll likely not need to loosen it much.
This makes enough pesto for at least 4-6 bowls of pasta. It stores in the fridge for about 3 days.
If not using for pasta, you can use it as a pizza or focaccia topping instead of tomato sauce or as a sandwich / panino spread. I absolutely recommend making a grilled cheese with this pesto smeared on the inside part of both your bread slices. Trust me on this one. / Valentina

pst! Scroll to the very bottom to download recipe pdf! - and apologies for any bloody masscres of the French language that may have happened with me (Lolly) reading that voiceover!

Valentina's Sicilian Raw Tomato Pesto

Pasta al Pesto alla Siciliana

FOR 4/6 PEOPLE

The ingredients

125g fresh ricotta, preferably of the thicker, dryer kind
400g ripe tomatoes (preferably Italian ‘sauce’ tomatoes, such as San Marzano, Vesuvio, Perini, Roma….)
Basil leaves, about half a packed cup
60 to 80g grated Parmigiano or Pecorino, depending on your personal taste
1 garlic clove
50g pine nuts or blanched almonds
100 ml extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste, plus coarse salt for the pasta water
160g short pasta of your choice

The method

If your ricotta is a bit watery or loose, put it in a fine-mesh strainer and leave it to drain for some 30 minutes or even overnight.
Cut up the tomatoes, and add them to a blender along all other pesto ingredients. Blend until smooth. Taste and adjust flavor to your taste: I suggest you add salt at the end, as various brands of ricotta can be more or less salty, and the amount of parmigiano you add could even cover your salt needs on its own. I usually find that, for this pesto, a pinch is enough.
Bring a pot of water to a boil and salt it. 160g is usually the amount of pasta to boil for two servings - boil 200 if you’re a hungry bunch, or boil 360 to 400 grams for 4 people.
Boil the pasta you chose for the amount of time indicated on the package. Or, even better, drain it a minute or two earlier to make it al dente.
Mix the pasta well with the pesto and serve. You can top it with extra chopped basil, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, extra Parmigiano and a sprinkle of pine nuts or chopped almonds.

Refrigerates well, up to 3 days.

NOTE: If the pesto turns out thicker, reserve 2-3 tablespoons of the pasta water when mixing it with the pasta, though you’ll likely not need to loosen it much.

Buon appetito!

Creamy red pesto in a small glass jar on a red tablecloth, penne pasta with red pesto in an old fashioned pasta bowl with flowered edges on an outdoor table dappled with shadow from the trees and sunlight — Creamy red pesto pasta under the olive trees. Photo credit: Valentina Solfrini

Bonus Recipe: Caffè Shakerato

3pm on a late August Tuesday: My dear friend Federica and I wandered a zonzo in our quiet neighborhood, trolling for afternoon coffee. It’s August in Italy; nothing was open and we weren’t sure where to go. She’d just returned from the US that morning and was jet-lagged but fighting it off; I was in need of a mid-work caffeine hit. I’d run out of coffee grounds for my moka. Oven-blasting heat wasn’t helping us get anywhere.

There were open bars and grocery stores in the center, but we didn’t want to go to ‘the tourist area’. After 9 blocks of dodging from tree shadow to tree shadow, 3 closed bars, 1 closed alimentari, and much sweat, Federica remembered the little bar in what is either a very small park or a very large shady island in between 3 roads outside the center. It was open and the owner really couldn’t explain why as he’d meant to close in the afternoon. Grazie al cielo!

This called for shakerato aka Italian iced coffee, which is espresso shaken with ice and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker, and served in a fancy martini glass or wine glass. The result: an icy cold, sweet espresso with a velvety consistency and thick frothy top due to mixing with air. You can always get an unsweetened shakerato, but the density of the sugar helps build the froth and bubbles. Sharing our shakerati with you in the video and recipe below. It’s such an easy icy treat to make at home on a hot day.

Creating a perfect Shakerato is an art, a precise and passionate choreography.
‘Creare uno Shakerato perfetto è un’arte, una coreografia di precisione e passione.’ -Piatto

Traditional Shakerato Recipe (courtesy of Piatto)

Serving size: 1 cocktail

Prep time: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

1 double espresso (about 60 ml)
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
Ice cubes

A cold cocktail glass (preferably a martini glass)
Shaker (preferably Boston style)

Method:

Make a double espresso and let it cool for a minute.
Meanwhile, chill a cocktail glass by placing it in the refrigerator or filling it with ice.
Place the espresso and sugar in a shaker. Add ice cubes until the shaker is about half full.
Close the shaker and shake vigorously for about 10 seconds. The movement will create a thick, cold foam.
Remove the ice from the cocktail glass and strain the contents of the shaker into the glass.
Serve immediately to best enjoy the freshness and foam of the Shakerato.
Optional: Often the bars here will ask if I want to add a little liquor like Baileys or Amaretto to make it more festive.

Pimp my Pasta

Welcome back to Pimp my Pasta where you beautiful readers send me photos of your WPFI inspired creations. This week features Jillian Bybee, who recently made the Effortless Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Fusilotti and I hope the next time she makes it, she invites me over because, look at how it turned out!

Jillian and I bonded over a shared love of seasonal cooking and Michigan farmers markets. She’s not just an amazing home cook, but also a physician and writer of Humans Leading, a Substack about simple impactful ways to efficiently deal with overwhelm and recover from burnout. If you suffer from any overwhelm, like I do, and could use some practical quick fixes and reminders, I can’t recommend her practical tips enough. I read this post 5 times. ❤️

Summer in a bowl. Photo credit: Jillian Bybee

‘The pasta was delicious! The only tweaks I made were using orecchiette (because that’s what I had) and roasting the vegetables ahead of time. I tossed them with the cooked pasta and some pasta water when it was time for dinner and the heat warmed them through. It was perfect.’ - Jillian

Jillian very cleverly swapped the fusilotti for orecchiette, ear-shaped pasta and a perfect pasta choice which cradles and matches the size of the veggies, making bites easy to fork up. Gnam! aka ‘yum’ in Italian!