Why real pistachio gelato is brown, not bright green

At least once a week someone at our counter points at the pistachio tray and asks if it has gone off. It is a pale, muddy green-brown, nothing like the bright mint green most people expect. That colour is exactly how pistachio gelato looks when it is made from pistachios alone.

A roasted pistachio is green only in its outer layer; the inside is cream and the skin is purple-brown. Grind the whole nut into paste, as we do each week, and you get a soft olive colour. When the paste is churned with milk, it lightens further. The vivid green in many ice creams comes from food colour, often with a flavouring paste that contains very few nuts and sometimes almond essence to fake the taste.

Our pistachio gelato uses about 110 g of roasted pistachio paste per litre, with Palghar milk, a little cream and cane sugar. Pistachios cost us around ₹1,800 a kilo, which is why the tub is ₹640, our most expensive flavour. You can taste the difference: real pistachio is toasty and slightly salty even without salt, and it leaves a faint bitterness at the end, like the nut itself.

If you want to judge a pistachio gelato anywhere, look for a dull colour, ask whether the paste is made in-house, and taste for that toasted edge. Bright green and very sweet is usually a sign of colour and essence.