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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

I had the privilege of seeing this documentary as a kid, when it first aired in the US on the Jack Paar show around 1960.

Of course, growing up in an Italian family in Oregon, I knew perfectly well what spaghetti was made of, which made the documentary even more hilarious.

When we visited my grandmother near Portland, there would always be two big platters of spaghetti, one with the usual red sauce, and one with pesto!

We called that "spaghetti with green stuff" and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way.

One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here's the recipe I'm starting with:

https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe

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PSA: pesto is incredibly simple to make at home, and way way way better than store-bought pesto. At minima you need olive oil, garlic, some green leafy things (basil, spinach, parsley... I've done some with only parsly stems), some sort of hard cheese, salt and some sort of mixer. Adding nuts, using good EVOO, multiple cheeses and a pestle&mortar gives even better results, but even without that it'll be delicious!

Just to play unfold-that-acronym, here "EVOO" is simply extra virgin olive oil, i.e. the good stuff. Pretty obvious if you're into cookery I guess, but it did pause me for a few seconds anyway. :)

Home pesto maker here. It's not for the faint of heart. Each year I grow four basil plants - it takes close to an hour to completely de-leaf and de-stem just one plant. I end up with a stock pot full of leaves. Those are then ground with pine nuts (close to $7 for a small jar - I need 4-5 jars), close to a gallon of olive oil (the brand I use comes in gallons, so about $30), and lots of cheese (I honestly don't remember how much I spend on cheese). The result is great, but it's definitely a day's work plus close to $100.

Yeah but how much do you end up with? A gallon of OO makes it sound like a lot…

To balance your comment: I just use whatever basil I happen to have bought from the shop, whatever nuts or seeds I have lying aroung (almond, pumpkin seeds...), I always have extra-virgin olive oil and parmesan. It takes me maybe 5min start-to-finish to make enough pesto for a couple people, or I can buy more basil to make a bigger batch to freeze.

It's not super-cheap (I use good olive oil), but I'd definitely call that "for the faint of heart": pesto is one of the easiest sauces you can make for pasta and is very forgiving (you can vary ingredients, texture, it's ). You don't need to make pesto by the kilogram :)

> way way way better than store-bought pesto

Try LeGrand pesto. It can be a bit difficult to find, but Whole Foods usually has it. Seriously, it's head and shoulders above any other pesto I've had (store bought, restaurant or homemade). We've been using it for like 15 years now.

All store bought things with intensive tastes suffer from the same phenomena, the flavours leak into one another, creating a uniform flavour distribution, which lacks the variety a fresh mixed set of ingredients still posses.

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