I don’t blame today’s cooks or chefs, they are merely designing recipes for the person who wants cheap and simple. Recipes that take more than 30 minutes to prepare, contain more that 3 ingredients, use salt as their primary seasoning or cost more than a dollar a serving are quickly discarded from consideration. However, if you do this, you miss one of the wonders of desserts… a Pistachio pie.
Pistachios are mainly used as a ‘flavoring’ or as a garnish to recipes and this is an unreasonable compromise to cost as one never quite reaches a true Pistachio ‘high.’ Don’t believe me, but look around the internet and you will find recipes for a ‘cream Pistachio pie”… which means it has a few pistachios on the top with a flavoring of Pistachio in the cream. Take a look at the Pistachio trade groups and you will see that they mention Pistachio recipes in passing as almost an afterthought. At trade shows, Pistachios are often shown in the bag… salted or unsalted, roasted or not, Jalapeno or other flavors… but nothing more exciting than that. The reason is that the world is only beginning to see Pistachios in any quantity.
It is important to remember that in parts of the world where Pistachios are plentiful there are many recipes.. some of them are actually good. I can’t imagine — for examples– a Baklava where Pistachios isn’t the primary ingredient!
Pistachios have some challenges putting them into pie form… but not insurmountable but the texture and variety needs to be addressed … stay tuned for the final recipe.
Roger