Salsa di noci – Ligurian walnut sauce

Tear the weighed bread roll crumb into small pieces and put it in a small bowl. Pour over all 150 g milk and leave for about 5 minutes until the bread is well soaked. Keep the milk in the bowl for the rest of the sauce preparation.

After the bread has soaked, make sure no fragments of hard shell remain among the walnuts. Leave the thin brown skins on the kernels. Put the walnuts in a small food processor, add the finely chopped garlic and all the salt. Process in short pulses to fine crumbs, pausing and scraping down the sides. Stop the machine before the walnuts begin turning into a fatty paste.

Gently squeeze the soaked crumb over the same bowl, keeping all the milk that comes out. Add the bread to the ground walnuts. Pour in a small amount of milk from the bowl and briefly blend so the ingredients start coming together into a thick mixture. If needed, stop the machine and scrape down the sides with a spatula.

Gradually add all the olive oil and the remaining milk from the bowl, blending in short pulses with pauses. Do not pour away any milk. Transfer the sauce to a small bowl, thoroughly scraping it out of the processor, and stir with a spoon. It should be thick and creamy, with very fine walnut grains and brown skin flecks, without a separate layer of olive oil. Serve four portions of sauce with separately cooked pansoti or other pasta. Do not cook the sauce itself, and do not fry it.