The Pistachio — Why Sicilian Pistachio Ruins Everything Else Forever

I had been eating pistachios my whole life without ever tasting one.

That sounds dramatic, but it's true. The pistachio I knew — from grocery store bags, from trail mix, from ice cream that was flavoured green — was a perfectly fine nut and fun to open but I had never thought much about.

Then I opened a jar of Sicilian Pistachio Cream and ate a spoonful off a piece of toast and stood in my kitchen and genuinely didn't know what to do with myself.

It was the same nut. It was completely different. How?!

Sicilian pistachios — grown in the volcanic soil around Mount Etna, where no other pistachio grows quite like this — are called oro verde: green gold. Not because of their colour, though they are a deeper, more saturated green than any other variety. But because of what they taste like.

Rich. Nutty. With something underneath the nuttiness that's harder to name — a depth that comes directly from the soil, from the minerals deposited by centuries of volcanic activity, from growing in conditions that stress the tree in exactly the right ways. The pistachio responds by becoming more intensely itself.

The trees are harvested every two years. Not every year — every two, which allows the tree to fully recover and produce fruit that's worth the wait. Each tree is harvested by hand. The outer hull is removed before the nut dries, which preserves the vivid colour and the complex flavour that makes these pistachios what they are.

There are pistachios from California. From Iran. From Turkey. All of them are fine. None of them taste like this.

Once you've had Sicilian pistachio — really had it, in something where the flavour can speak for itself — everything else becomes a compromise. 

That's the curse and the gift of it. You'll know.

→ Shop Sicilian Pistachio Cream

→ Shop Sicilian Pistachio Pesto

One ingredient. A thousand uses. Always Sicilian.