One of the world’s most luxurious nuts, the pistachio can do more than accompany your drinks at the bar,
That’open mussel’ appearance, that along with the green flesh so distinguishes pistachios from other nuts, is a natural occurrence.
When ripe the shell cracks open with an audible’pop’. We tend to eat them roasted, but they are equally edible raw. And their health benefits are now largely agreed on.
Of course like most nuts they can cause violent allergic reactions in some people and one should always be careful who one offers nuts to.
Borna Foods are a newish British firm who sell a range of artisan pistachio butters using nuts sourced from family-owned farms.
Their Nut Butters are 100% natural with no sugar, oils or preservatives, and you can have smooth and crunchy.They’re not cheap, but then pistachios rarely are and these are the very best.
We tried a sample of Borna’s 100% Sweet Roast Pistachio Nut Butter, a blend of lightly roasted pistachios, along with Cashew Nuts, Agave Syrup and Coconut cream.
The 100% seems to refer to the sourcing, as it cannot be true of what’s in the jar if cashews are involved.
Nicely smooth, gently sweet and creamy it was very versatile. We put it into muesli in the morning, spread it on toast and rather shamefully ate it out of the jar. It is by the way approved as both kosher and vegan.
The crunchier version is, well, crunchier and does only contain pistachios. I rather preferred this one myself but it was 50:50 with the others.
As none of us had gone into anaphylactic shock, we carried on to try the pistachio milks.These come in two flavours; Lightly Sweetened and Unsweetened and are made from 96% water and 4% pistachio.
A special roasting process keeps the green colour intact and sea salt, Calcium and Vitamin B12 are added and it naturally provides monounsaturated fatty acids.
It is, of course, free from dairy and gluten.Unopened it has a long larder life, but once opened it will do three days in the fridge. It is actually a lot nicer when chilled and the sweetened version has a little sugar added.
I’m not exactly nuts about nut products- a pack of salted peanuts and a beer does me – but these are pretty flavoursome things and well worth checking out for a taste of something different.
Borna have a wide range of nut products and you can buy them online