This Jar of Pistachio Spread Adds a Touch of Luxury to All My Baked Goods

Pistachio spread can be used in tiramisu, chocolate bars, conchas, and more

I will admit that it took me well into my thirties to fully appreciate the pistachio’s range as a dessert ingredient. Maybe this speaks to a lack of sophistication or worldliness on my part, but it also might be because, for much of my youth, most pistachio desserts in the United States involved a cloying amount of sugar, a heavy dose of green food dye, and a drop or two of almond extract as a stand-in for the alluring perfume of pistachios themselves. If you were lucky, a spoonful of pastel green ice cream might contain a few soggy pieces of the real thing.

Now, by contrast, the world is our pistachio. With a click, a pastry chef or aspiring home baker can buy dainty Turkish pistachios in the shell, caramel-coated pistachios, slivered Sicilian pistachios, or baby pistachio kernels grown in Afghanistan. A pistachio lover could drink their coffee in the morning with a splash of pistachio milk and a pump of pistachio syrup. But most exciting for me personally, I can walk into a specialty Italian grocery store with $16 and buy a jar of pale green, glossy, ganache-like Scyavuru Crunchy Pistachio Spread, studded with a few granules of candied pistachio in each spoonful.

In recent years, pistachio creams and spreads have become a go-to for food writers and recipe developers who seek the ingredient out as a user-friendly shortcut to pure pistachio color and flavor. The cream’s buttery, spreadable texture makes it easy to swap in as a filling or a glaze for pastries, or as a sweetener for cheesecakes. On TikTok, people are blowing through giant jars of Costco pistachio cream by melting it into steamed milk for lattes and mixing it with knafeh for a crunchy-creamy chocolate bar filling.

I landed on Scyavuru’s spread after a few solid years of shopping around for a favorite. On the crunchier end of the scale, there’s Big Spoon’s salty-sweet Pistachio Crunch, which is sort of an almond-butter-and-pistachio-spread hybrid that I like spreading onto apple slices. Less crunchy but still pleasantly sandy-textured, there is Kalustyan’s gloriously unsweetened house brand of pistachio paste, which I enjoy adding to my oatmeal on occasion. And then, on the other end of the textural spectrum, there is a whole suite of Italian brands of pistachio creams that have been emulsified into silky-smooth oblivion with sugar and oils (picture Jif, but expensive and green).

To me, Scyavuru’s Crunchy Pistachio Spread is a happy medium — it’s spreadable and spoonable but full of crunchy pieces of pistachio. The spread gets a touch of soft richness from milk powder and whey powder, and a restrained amount of natural coloring keeps the spread from leaning too brown. It has the lushness and roasty flavors of a homemade pistachio praline, without all of the shelling, peeling, caramelizing, and grinding.

Scyavuru, which also makes a variety of spreads (including a terrifyingly blue “Crema Cotton Candy”) recommends spreading their pistachio cream onto crepes, piping it into muffins, and using it to flavor and tint mascarpone for tiramisu. An even lower-maintenance option listed on the jar is to simply put it “on your rusks.”

I’ve been dying to use this shortcut to make a cheater’s Paris-Brest, but in the meantime, the cream has made its way into many other pastries. I’ve drizzled it across the surface of melted chocolate in batches of matzo toffee to create a marbled effect. I’ve mixed it with flour, butter, and sugar to make a brittle, crackly green topping for conchas. I recently baked a batch of the maritozzi from Renato Poliafito’s cookbook, Dolce, and swiped the inside of each ball of brioche with a spoonful of pistachio cream before whisking even more pistachio cream into a cloud of whipped cream to fill each bun. The little bits of crunch throughout the cream meant that I didn’t need to peel, toast, and chop more nuts to sprinkle on top to get the full pistachio effect.

The world of pastry can be intimidating, especially if you’re aiming to finish a baking project in time to pair it with your mid-morning cup of coffee. Keeping one of these little green jars in my pantry means that even my most half-assed baked goods have a touch of luxury.

Anna Hezel is a New York-based journalist, the co-founder of Best Food Blog, and the author of Tin to Table and Lasagna.