Green Pesto Gouda Pasta Recipe
Why this works
Pesto and cheese belong together, so someone had the sense to put them in the same wheel. Green Pesto Gouda is creamy and smooth with a gentle nuttiness from the Gouda base, lifted by bright basil and a savoury hint of garlic. That means the flavour of a pesto pasta is already sitting in the cheese. You do not need to make a sauce from scratch, and you do not need a food processor on the bench.
Gouda melts well. Grated finely and stirred through hot pasta with a splash of the cooking water, it turns into a sauce in under a minute. The starch in the water does the work. What you get is a weeknight dinner that tastes like you put more into it than you did, from a cheese made in the Netherlands.
Ingredients
Serves 4. Prep 10 minutes. Cook 15 minutes.
400 g dried pasta, something with ridges or twists
180 g Green Pesto Gouda, rind removed, finely grated
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, thinly sliced
250 g cherry tomatoes, halved
1 handful basil leaves
30 g pine nuts
Black pepper
Salt for the pasta water
The pack is 180 g, which is the whole quantity here. Grate it while the water heats, and grate it fine. Coarse shreds take longer to melt and are more likely to clump. Leave it out of the fridge for a bit if you have the time.
Method
Bring a large pot of water to the boil and salt it well. Add the pasta and cook until just short of tender.
While the pasta cooks, toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan over medium heat. Move them around. Take them off as soon as they colour, and tip them onto a plate so they stop cooking.
Put the same pan back on low heat with the olive oil and the sliced garlic. Cook gently until the garlic smells sweet and is only just turning gold. Do not let it brown.
Add the cherry tomatoes, turn the heat up, and cook for two or three minutes until they slump and start to release their juice. Season with pepper.
Before you drain the pasta, scoop out a mugful of the cooking water and keep it.
Drain the pasta and tip it into the pan with the tomatoes. Take the pan off the heat completely. This matters. Direct heat makes the cheese split rather than melt.
Add the grated cheese in three or four handfuls, stirring after each one, with a splash of the pasta water each time. Keep stirring until it pulls together into a glossy sauce that coats the pasta.
If it looks thick or grainy, add more of the hot water, a little at a time, and keep stirring. It will come back together.
Tear in the basil, scatter over the pine nuts, and grind on more pepper. Serve straight away, while the sauce is still loose.
Notes and substitutions
Any short pasta works. Long pasta works too, though you will want to stir harder to get the sauce through it.
No pine nuts is fine. Toasted walnuts or almonds do the same job. If you are cooking for someone with allergies, read the pack: it declares milk and pine nuts.
You can skip the tomatoes and add peas or spinach at the end instead. A squeeze of lemon lifts it if the sauce tastes flat.
Buy the cheese in one piece and grate it yourself. It melts better that way, and it keeps longer. For how long to keep it and where to put it in the fridge, see How to Store & Handle Artisan Cheese.
Leftovers are good cold the next day, loosened with a little olive oil.