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There’s a lot of good pistachio folklore out there. The Queen of Sheba allegedly loved thenutsso much that she forbade the hoi polloi from growing them, reserving pistachios exclusively for royal stomachs. There’s also an old saying that if two lovers meet in a pistachio grove under the light of the moon and hear the nut shells splitting, their relationship will have good luck. Aw.
But my favorite bit of pistachio lore isn’t lore at all. Much like psychic vampires and your worst legacy friend, pistachios suck the air out of a room. I mean that quite literally: Even after they’ve been harvested, pistachios are still alive. Their metabolic processes churn on unabated, andthe nuts continue breathing—absorbing oxygen and excreting carbon dioxide. If you’ve got a ton of nuts and a tight space, that could spell trouble. The German government’s Transport Information Service, which provides “cargo loss prevention information for German marine insurers,”warns潜在的开心果托运人:“如果通风been inadequate... or has failed owing to a defect, life-threatening CO2 concentrations or O2 shortages may arise.”
That’s right: Pistachios can kill.
It’s also a scientific fact that raw pistachios are pyrophoric—that is, they canspontaneously combustunder certain conditions, which makes transporting them a bit of an ordeal if you don’t want your cargo ship to, you know, explode. Again from the TIS: “Fresh pistachio nuts with a high water content tend in particular towards rapid self-heating and may also ignite.”
So pistachios can asphyxiate and pistachios can blow up—which, if you ask a nut like me, makes them even more exciting when you bake them into pistachio cookies.
InCookies: The New Classics, cookbook author Jesse Szewczyk folds these volatile kernels into beautifully green, flourless, gluten-free cookies. They straddle the line between states of matter (or in this casetexture) by remaining both crispy and chewy at the same time. This is due to the egg whites that both moisten and bind the dough, which is gently scented with ground cardamom—a fitting complement for nuts that hail from the Middle East. As in a macaron, the egg white and sugar dehydrate on the exterior, crisping up the edges, while they remain chewy and marshmallowy at the center.
“The trick,” Szewczyk notes, “is to bake the cookies just until the tops are cracked. Fresh from the oven, they will be soft and practically impossible to pick up, but once cooled, they will be perfectly chewy.”
Szewczyk also adds that these pistachio cookies will turn out greenest if you use the raw variety but will give you a noticeably milder flavor than if you'd used toasted pistachios. I say throw pyrophoric caution to the wind and use a mix of raw and toasted to get the best of both worlds. Yourholiday cookieplate will look all the better with these verdant beauties and you’ll have some fun little pistachio facts with which to impress your guests as they take a bite.
