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What are good substitutes for pine nuts for flavouring genovese?

Homemade genovese sauce

Hello!

I have recently been enjoying making homemade Genovese sauce whenever I can get my hands on fresh sweet basil.

It is a very useful base sauce because we can just put all the ingredients in a blender at once and it's ready to use.

The only problem is that there are pine nuts among the ingredients. I used to make a Genovese sauce sometimes without the pine nuts.

But what I like about pine nuts is that they add a lot: the texture of the mash into an oil sauce like Genovese, the aroma is richer, and the oil element, which is different from oil, makes the taste more three-dimensional.

We therefore searched for nuts that could be substituted for pine nuts.

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Recommended substitutes for pine nuts

In order of recommendation, they are as follows.

  1. Pumpkin seeds
  2. Sunflower seeds
  3. Cashew nuts
  4. Walnuts

Pumpkin seeds

Expected features in the substitutions

The nuts must be:

  • Nuts that have no skins *1.
  • They should be light in flavour *2.
  • Nuts that are not too oily.

Summary

Pumpkin seeds are rather bland in taste, they blend well with the sauce, and their small size makes them perfect for the blender!

They're all easier to find than pine nuts, and the leftovers can be used for sweets and other things, so give them a try!

*1:those with thin skins (brown parts), such as almonds, tend to remain in the mouth and stand out in the sauce

*2:a distinctive taste, such as pistachio nuts, can easily alter the flavour of the sauce