The dish that proves the finishing oil principle better than any explanation is pasta fredda in verde — Italian cold pasta with raw herbs, pine nuts, baby spinach, and a quiet showering of Parmigiano. There's no cooking the dressing. There's no reducing anything. The flavor of the finished dish is, almost entirely, the flavor of the olive oil you decide to use.
This version is adapted from a classic published by Italy's Sale & Pepe — a summer staple in Italian home cooking, on the table in thirty minutes, built for warm evenings.
Italian Cold Pasta with Pine Nuts and Herbs
Serves 4 · Prep 15 min · Cook 10 min · 450 cal/serving
Ingredients
- 11 oz (320g) durum wheat semolina pasta — short shapes (fusilli, penne, farfalle)
- 1 spring onion (scallion), most of the green tops trimmed off
- 1/3 cup (50g) pine nuts
- 3.5 oz (100g) baby spinach, divided
- 2–3 sprigs fresh mint
- 1 sprig fresh marjoram
- 1 small bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley
- 1 oz (30g) Parmigiano Reggiano, shaved into thin curls with a vegetable peeler
- Italian extra virgin olive oil, to taste
- Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper, to taste
Method
1. Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and salt it generously. Cook the pasta for the time on the box. With five minutes left on the timer, drop the trimmed spring onion into the same pot to blanch alongside the pasta. Drain everything together and rinse immediately under cold running water until the pasta is cool. Spread on a clean kitchen towel to dry, then transfer to a wide bowl and toss with two tablespoons of olive oil.
2. Make the herb sauce. Pick the leaves from the parsley, mint, and marjoram. Wash and dry the herbs and the spinach. In a food processor, combine the herbs, half the spinach, the blanched spring onion (cut into rough pieces), half the pine nuts, four tablespoons of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Blend until you have a thick, smooth, deeply green sauce. Taste and adjust salt.
3. Toast the remaining pine nuts. In a small dry skillet over medium heat, toast the rest of the pine nuts for one to two minutes, shaking the pan, until they're just golden. Watch closely — they go from perfect to burnt fast.
4. Assemble. Add the herb sauce to the pasta and toss to coat. Scatter the toasted pine nuts, the remaining baby spinach, and the Parmigiano shavings on top. Finish with one final drizzle of your best Italian extra virgin olive oil — this is the moment that decides the dish — and grind black pepper over the top. Serve immediately, at room temperature.
Notes
The olive oil matters more here than any other ingredient. A bland or oxidized oil will make a bland dish; a fresh, peppery Italian EVOO will carry the entire bowl. Use the best you have.
This is a pure-EVOO dish — the bright mint, parsley, and marjoram backbone wouldn't survive a truffle finish (the musk of truffle competes with green herbs rather than complementing them). For dishes where truffle does finish well — hot pasta with butter, scrambled eggs, roasted potatoes, risotto — see our Italian truffle finishing oils.