Italy has no shortage of sauces. In fact, some of them are among the tastiest and most sought-after Italian gastronomic excellences. You will find a wide choice, although it must be said that the most famous sauces can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are in a class of their own, so famous that they are sometimes considered separately.
We are talking about tomato sauce, the Italian “salsa” par excellence. Passata is the real Italian sauce, enjoyed all over the world today. In the regions of southern Italy it is still made using the old methods, cooked for hours and hours in a giant pot. The end result is remarkable: a sauce with a unique taste that can only be found in Italy.
Tomato sauce is mainly used to dress pasta. The same goes for another sauce from Liguria that has become famous all over the world and, as a result, an icon of made in Italy: pesto, invented in Liguria.
More than a sauce, as its name suggests, it is a “pounded” preparation. It is made with basil leaves crushed with a pestle in a mortar of beech wood or stone. But beware: true pesto is made only with a Ligurian variety of basil.
Finally, there is béchamel. Used as a key ingredient in lasagne and other baked pasta dishes, béchamel is a thoroughly Italian recipe, according to tradition. To trace its inventor we must go back to around the 16th century. It is thought to have been invented by a woman – and not just any woman, but Catherine de’ Medici.
Wife of Henry II and Queen of France, the Florentine noblewoman added a pinch of salt and a pinch of nutmeg to milk, and combined it with a “roux” of butter and flour blended together. That is how béchamel was born, one of the most popular Italian sauces in the world.
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