Feta pesto is a type of pesto that features the feta cheese that is now popular in world markets. Pesto is a mix of basil and other ingredients that provides a green savory sauce. Adding feta cheese makes this dish even more complex, and provides even more of a taste sensation, although it is less common than the simpler green pesto, partly because the normal pesto is less perishable.
The basic elements in traditional pesto include the basil herb. This green herb is mixed with pine nuts and vegetable oil. Garlic may also be included. All of these are blended into a sort of puree that serves as a spread for pizzas and various other foods.
Cooks may add feta cheese to pesto to provide a balance between the hearty tastes of the herbs and oils and the rich dairy flavor of the nuts. Because feta cheese is most commonly soaked in brine, the feta adds a lot of salt to the sauce. Feta is a cheese that crumbles fairly easily, a dried cheese that can be served in blocks or already crumbled into recipes. While some cooks may blend the feta into the pesto, others may only crumble it on top.
Pesto versions that include feta cheese also often include other additional elements. For example, a cook may add artichoke hearts or other rich greens to the feta pesto sauce. Tomatoes may also be added to pesto, though they are not a traditional element of this dish. Where tomatoes are added, they may often be in a sun-dried form, where they can be more easily blended into the dish. Cooks may also add salt and pepper or other spices. Although normally pesto does not include a lot of extraneous spices, allspice, cumin, or other ground spices might be added by some cooks to give the feta pesto sauce a unique flavor profile.
Feta pesto has a number of different uses. It can be spread on toast or put into a pizza sauce. It can be blended into a meat or vegetarian pasta dish, or put inside raviolis. In the modern culinary world, pesto is enjoying a lot of prominence as a multi-use sauce that displays some of the great traditional flavors of the Italy.
