Perhaps it is difficult to find a person who would never see a pine nut. These small, hidden under a dense dark brown shell, the fruits of the Siberian cedar are sources of a mass of biologically active substances: various vitamins, trace elements, as well as valuable oil.
The benefits of pine nuts have been known for a very long time. Even Avicenna mentioned the most useful properties of this fruit in his writings on medicine. Eating pine nuts is useful for both children and adults, as they provide the body with many vitamins and minerals, as well as help strengthen immunity.
However, for many of us, pine nuts are, first of all, yummy, associated with childhood. True, to get to the very pulp of the nut, you need to work a little, because they have a fairly dense and strong shell, which makes up almost half of the total mass. According to experts, it is easiest to remove a nut by sprinkling its shell with boiling water. Although many of us must have bitten her with teeth or crushed her with garlic gum.
Of course, on sale there are already peeled pine nuts, which do not have to bother for a long time. But cedar oil is very unstable and quickly deteriorating, so peeled nuts quickly become rancid and can be dangerous to human health. In this regard, buying such a product is not recommended. It’s better to spend a bit of energy and time fighting the shell and enjoy some really healthy and healthy nuts.
In Soviet times, a pine nut was considered mainly a therapeutic agent, but in recent years it has become widely used in cooking. After all, this is a delicious treat, especially if you let the nuts a little in the pan. There are a variety of recipes with pine nuts: they are added to salads, and to vegetable, meat and fish dishes. However, perhaps the most famous dish using this ingredient is Italian pesto sauce. True, in Italy itself instead of pine nuts they use the fruits of pine pine - the closest relative of Siberian cedar. We bring to your attention a couple of recipes that use pine nuts.
Cheese snack with nuts
As ingredients, we need 250 grams of Roquefort cheese, 200 grams of already peeled pine nuts and 50 grams of butter. The cheese must be mashed in a porcelain mortar, then add oil to it and grind until a homogeneous mass is formed. We divide the nuts into two parts: add the first to the resulting cheese mass, mix and roll into small balls, which are rolled in the remaining nut mass and put on a dish.
Sauce with pine nuts "pesto"
To prepare the dish we need the following ingredients: Parmesan cheese - 50 grams, basil - 50 grams, olive oil - 100 ml, a couple of garlic cloves, three tablespoons of peeled pine nuts, peeled, salt.
Finely chop the garlic and cheese and put all the ingredients in a blender. Beat until a homogeneous mass is formed. The delicious sauce is ready! However, be careful when adding salt, as Parmesan itself is a fairly salty product.