Fifty-five nautical miles southwest of Sicily sits Pantelleria. The windswept volcanic island, which is governed by the Sicilian province of Trapani but is geographically closer to Tunisia, was historically difficult to access by boat or plane, so the inhabitants ate almost exclusively what they grew or produced themselves.
Behind the Recipes
Pesto Pantesco is the Rare Italian Pesto of the Islands
Pantelleria’s little-known pesto is defined by what grows on the isle’s hot, rocky landscape. Most notably: capers
By and
Published June 4, 2024.
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“In general, the food in Pantelleria depends on creativity rather than variety,” said Mary Taylor Simeti, an American-born author who has lived in Sicily for decades and written about the culture and cuisine. “Doing imaginative things with a fairly limited list of ingredients.”
Pesto pantesco is precisely that. The island’s version of Italy’s iconic mashed sauce (“pantesco” is the adjective form of “Pantelleria”; “pesto” means “crushed”) is made by pulverizing locally grown staples such as tomatoes; garlic; basil and/or parsley; almonds; and, most notably, capers with olive oil until the mixture is coarsely pureed.
Tossed with pasta, the sauce is lush, hearty, bright and imbued with a funky, meaty depth and a nuanced pepperiness that’s hard to identify unless you’ve had the pleasure of working with salted capers.
Ingredient: Salted Capers
The briny pop of capers packed in vinegar is fine for punctuating buttery piccata or smoked salmon on a bagel. But if you want to add true caper flavor (not just microbursts of acidity) to your food, seek out the salted kind.
All capers are grown, harvested, and fermented in much the same way. The unopened flower buds from Capparis spinosa, a shrub that sprawls in hot Mediterranean climates, are picked before sunrise lest they unfurl in the daylight. Then they’re fermented in salt to mellow their intense pungency; free up volatile compounds such as ionone and nerolidol, which taste like violets and orange blossoms, respectively; and develop lovely grassy, meaty funk.
But whether you taste that complexity depends largely on what the buds are packed in. Those nuances stand out in salt-packed capers, adding unique depth to preparations such as pesto pantesco and caponata, but are largely obscured by acidity when the capers are packed in vinegar.
The unopened flower buds are one of the island’s few prized crops, plucked from shrubs that grow wild in its rich volcanic soil.
Fermented and then preserved in salt, they’re the backbone of Pantelleria’s pesto and, as Simeti pointed out to me, the component that distinguishes the tiny island’s pesto from the similar tomato-and-almond-based sauce made in Trapani.
The key to this sauce (and, really, the only difference among pesto pantesco formulas) is the proportion of ingredients. I started with ⅔ cup of slivered almonds—my preference over whole nuts because they lack skin, which can add bitterness and dull the pesto’s color—that I toasted and then blitzed in the food processor ahead of the other ingredients so that they broke down into evenly sized bits. (Typically, cooks pound the ingredients with a mortar and pestle; the food processor pulverizes everything in seconds.)
Then I pulsed in the other ingredients, including a generous 3 tablespoons of salted capers that I rinsed thoroughly of undissolved salt lest it potentially overseason the sauce. I added 1¼ pounds of ripe tomatoes, lots of basil and parsley, a clove of garlic, salt, and red pepper flakes.
When the mixture was pulpy but cohesive, I slowly streamed in olive oil until the sauce was emulsified.
What I got was a rough, orange-tinted puree vibrant with tomato sweetness and acidity, rich with ground nuts, verdant with herbs, and buoyed by the meaty underbelly of the capers. This is living off the land at its best.
