One of the chefs I met in Japan, Rupert, lives in Kamakura, a seaside town, and he told me that when he bought his house ten years before, the house itself was valued at almost nothing since it was 40 years old. (The land, however, was expensive.) Old houses, unlike here in the states, tend to be viewed as inferior.

My Vermont farmhouse was built in the 1820s and so I was thrilled when we drove two hours outside of Kyoto to visit cooking teacher Junko Hamilton at Kyotango, “Kyoto by the Sea.” The drive is increasingly spectacular—narrow valleys filled with rice paddies and traditional brown-black colored tiled-­roof houses—and Junko’s 100-year-old home offered instant respite from the hustle and bustle of Osaka and Nagoya. Dark, quiet, eccentric, and old school, it was a taste of the past, an experience not always easy to find in modern Japan.

Junko’s cooking is simple and fresh and so she whipped up a simple sauce, call it a pesto if you like, of miso and sansho leaves referred to as kinome-ae. (Kinome means sansho leaves.) Although she served it on fish, instead of pasta, the notion of a creamy, umami-rich miso as the basis for pesto intrigued me, the miso taking the place of Parmesan.

We tried both white and red miso although I prefer the former since white miso is sweet and milder. Yes, we use basil instead of sansho plus added scallions for a hint of the spicier sansho flavor. In keeping with Japanese cooking, we also added mirin and rice vinegar. Walnuts, with a hint of bitter, replaced pine nuts in the traditional pesto alla Genovese. As with a regular pesto, reserve some of the pasta cooking water to help loosen and bind the pesto to the pasta.

Unlike a traditional Italian pesto, the miso adds a creamy undercurrent that pairs nicely with the bright fresh flavor of basil and, in this case, the vinegar. It is not better than Genovese, especially if you have a bunch of super-fresh garden-grown basil, but when using store-bought basil, I think this miso pesto definitely has the edge.

Chris Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."