ingredients
Genovese Basil
Hawaii has the best quality basil in year-round production. And we would know, we’ve tried a few in the last forty years.
Garlic
Grown in Gilroy, California, by the Christopher Family, this garlic is incredible. California is known for its amazing garlic, touting a festival every year to celebrate this superfood. Hippocrates suggested using garlic to fight off infection and for improving stamina. This makes pesto such a good choice for game-day platters and summer cookouts.
Romano Cheese
Sheep’s Milk, Rennet, Salt
Made in Sardinia, land of sheep and mountains. The people here for thousands of years have practiced transhumance, a process that involves the shepherds moving their herds high up into the mountains all summer to graze. While up there, they make this cheese. Then they descend and spend the other half of the year in the village. Sardinia’s mountains are covered in little thousand-year-old rock shacks, and it’s people have an ancient style of singing that sounds exactly like sheep baying (probably from all that time with only sheep and men for company). The people making our cheese have had a LOT of practice.
Also in Sardinia, the same year Darlene started whipping up Vegetaball’s, a famous Italian singer/songwriter Fabrizio de André was kidnapped by Sardinians and hidden among the sheep in the mountains. Sardinia is so lovely, and his direct contacts so kind, he spoke kindly of them in court and wrote the deeply nostalgic song Hotel Supramonte in remembrance of his time. Fabrizio also happens to be from the region in Italy our basil variety hails from, Genoa. We like to think we have a connection to this artist.
Olive Oil
Olive Pomace Oil from the Coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Olive trees have been growing here for a millennium, I couldn’t hope to capture everything amazing about olives to tell you, so I’ll just tell you link a great article here.
Parmesan Cheese
Pasteurized cow’s milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes
With a history as rich and complex as Romano’s, our parmesan is made by incredible producers down in South America where they take deep care in honoring the traditional recipe and process of aging cheese.
Pine Nuts
Pine nuts, if you can imagine it, come from pine trees. Picture a pinecone, those scales each hold a nut, the nuts have to be shelled. Here’s a video. There are a few varieties of pine that grow large enough ones, but none of them are native to Eastern United States. We get ours from the pros over in Russia and China where large pine nuts grow extremely well.
Butter
Pasteurized Cream, Domestic
The addition of butter makes our pesto thicker, creamier, and deeply American. In Europe, there’s a line around the south of France and north of Italy that divides the cooking culture. North of this line, you cook with butter, south, olive oil. Think fluffy French croissants (all those layers? they’re butter pockets folded into the dough) verses a shorter focaccia, drenched in olive oil and sea salt. This pesto could not have arisen in Europe. Only American ingenuity could come up with this masterpiece.
Sea Salt
What recipe would be complete without it?
In case you were wondering, yes, salt is so important, it has shaped world history. Mark Kurlansky has a lot to say about that.
