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Pistache Ice Cream

A custard-based ice cream flavored with pistachio nuts and optionally colored green.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pistache Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the nuts

  1. Blanch the pistachio nuts by pouring boiling water over them and letting them sit for 10 minutes until the skins slip off.

  2. Grind the blanched nuts to a powder.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, cook the eggs, milk, and sugar over low heat until it thickens into a custard.

  2. Let the custard cool, then stir in the heavy cream and ground pistachio nuts.

  3. Add green food coloring to achieve the desired shade of green.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Pistachio + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Nuts + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together982 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard as they cook, giving the ice cream body and richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Heavy cream
Adds fat, which makes the ice cream smooth and creamy rather than icy.
Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavour and color in the ice cream.

The step that matters

Cook the custard over low heat. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures, so cooking gently over low heat thickens the custard smoothly. Higher heat can scramble the eggs into lumps.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pistachio, egg, milk, sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pistachio, egg, milk, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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