Delicious and nutritious, homemade walnut sauce is perfect both as a pasta sauce and as a spread for crostini. This is truly a precious recipe, representing an important symbol of Ligurian cuisine: Homemade Ligurian walnut sauce is just so genuine, healthy and light — plus, it’s made of few ingredients (but the right ones, of course), easy and no-cook.
How to make walnut sauce
Walnut sauce is especially ideal for making a quick pasta dish because you can prepare it while the water is boiling. Proceed as follows: Blanch 5 oz walnut kernels for one minute in a pot of boiling water. Drain them and remove the dark skins that cover them. Then place the kernels in a blender with 3 slices of bread (soaked in water and squeezed), 4 oz ricotta cheese, 1 clove of garlic, and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil. Blend until the sauce is smooth, adding a little more oil if necessary. This sauce is enough to season a pasta on its own, like the typical Ligurian pansotti, for 6 people. You can keep it in the fridge, in a hermetically sealed jar, covered with a veil of oil, for up to a week. Otherwise, you can also freeze it.
The traditional version: mortar and pestle
If you want, you can also choose to prepare the walnut sauce in the traditional way (i.e. with a mortar and pestle). The method is the same: Just pour all the ingredients into the mortar and then work with the pestle until everything is reduced to a cream. Enjoy your meal!