I must admit that it took me well into my thirties to fully appreciate the range of pistachios as a dessert ingredient. Maybe this means a lack of sophistication or worldliness on my part, but it could also be because, for most of my youth, most pistachio desserts in the United States involved a hefty amount of sugar. , a heavy dose of green food coloring, and a drop or two of almond extract as a stand-in for the alluring fragrance of the pistachios themselves. If you're lucky, a spoonful of pastel green ice cream might contain a few wet pieces of the real thing.
Now, on the contrary, the world is our pistachio. With one click, a pastry chef or aspiring home baker can buy beautiful Turkish pistachios in the shell, caramel-coated peastachios, chopped Sicilian pistachiosor baby pistachio kernels grown in Afghanistan. A pistachio lover can drink their morning coffee with a splash of pistachio milk and a bomb of pistachio syrup. But most exciting for me personally, I can walk into a specialty Italian grocery store with $16 and buy a jar of pale green, shiny, ganache-like Scyavuru Crunchy Pistachio Spreadinfused with a few granules of candied pistachio in each spoonful.
In recent years, pistachio creams and spreads have become a go-to for food writers and recipe developers looking for the ingredient as a user-friendly shortcut to pure color. and pistachio flavor. The cream's buttery, spreadable texture makes it easy to swap in as a filling or a glaze for pastriesor as a sweetener for cheesecakes. On TikTok, people blow giant jars of Costco's pistachio cream melting it into steamed milk for lattes and mix it with knafeh for a crunchy-creamy chocolate bar filling.
I arrived at Scyavuru's spread after several solid years of shopping for a favorite. On the crunchier end of the scale, there's Big Spoon's salty-sweet Pistachio Crunchwhich is kind of an almond-butter-and-pistachio-spread hybrid that I like to spread on apple slices. Not too crunchy but still nicely sandy-textured, there's Kalustyan's gloriously unsweetened house brand of pistachio paste, which I like to add to my oatmeal sometimes. And then, at the other end of the texture spectrum, there is a whole bunch of Italian brands of pistachio creams emulsified to silky-smooth oblivion with sugar and oils (picture Jif, but expensive and green).
For me, Scyavuru's Crunchy Pistachio Spread is a happy medium — it's spreadable and spoonable but packed with crunchy pistachio pieces. The spread gets a touch of soft richness from the milk powder and whey powder, and the limited amount of natural coloring prevents the spread from leaning too much coffee. It has the lushness and roasty flavors of a homemade pistachio praline, without all the shelling, peeling, caramelizing, and grinding.
Scyavuru, who also made a various spreads (including an awesome blue “Crema Cotton Candy”) recommends spreading their pistachio cream onto crepes, piping it into muffins, and using it to flavor and tint mascarpone for tiramisu. The lower maintenance option listed on the jar is to simply put it “on your rusks.”
I wanted to use this shortcut to make Paris-Brest in a cheater, but in the meantime, the cream got into many other pastries. I poured it over melted chocolate in batches of matzo toffee to create a marbled effect. I mix it with flour, butter, and sugar to make a brittle, crackly green topping for conchas. I recently cooked a batch of maritozzi from Renato Poliafito's cookbook, Dolceand swiped the inside of each brioche ball with a spoonful of pistachio cream before spreading more pistachio cream into a cloud of whipped cream to top each bun. The little bits of crunch in the whole cream meant I didn't have to shell, toast, and chop extra nuts to sprinkle on top to get the full pistachio effect.
The world of pastry can be intimidating, especially if you're aiming to finish a baking project in time to pair it with your mid-morning cup of coffee. Keeping one of these little green jars in my pantry means that even my most half-ass baked goods have a touch of luxury.
Anna Hezel is a journalist based in New York, the co-founder of Best Food Blogand the author of Table Tin and Lasagna.