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Pistachio Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made from pistachio paste, custard, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Pistachio Ice Cream

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 ↓

Pistachio 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.

  2. Slip off the skins.

  3. Grind the nuts to a powder or pound them to a paste, adding a few drops of cream if necessary.

Make the custard

  1. Prepare a custard with the eggs, milk, and sugar, cooking until thick and then cooling.

Finish and freeze

  1. Once cooled, add the heavy cream, pistachio paste, and enough green vegetable paste to achieve the desired color.

  2. Pour the mixture into an ice cream freezer and freeze.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 and add richness to the base.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the texture of the frozen ice cream.
Heavy cream
Adds fat for a smooth, creamy texture in the frozen ice cream.
Pistachio nuts
Provide the main nutty flavor and body of the ice cream.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, carrying the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until thick. The eggs must be cooked gently until the custard thickens; if overheated they can scramble, and if undercooked the base stays thin and will not set smoothly when frozen.

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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