Pistachio flour provides a nutty flavor and lovely green color in cakes, cookies, and other baked goods and desserts. Making it from scratch is easier than you’d think: all you need are fresh pistachios (and a little bit of time and patience).
Pistachio flour is basically just very finely ground pistachio nuts (sometimes it’s called pistachio meal). You can use pistachio flour in baked goods the same way you would almond flour (and can easily substitute it 1:1 in any recipe that calls for almond flour, like amaretti cookies or macarons).
I’ve shared more than one recipe that uses pistachio flour, and up until now I’ve always just bought it.
But the thing is, store-bought pistachio flour, despite being a rather pricey ingredient, is frankly, just not very pretty, usually a yellowish green sort of color that doesn’t exactly show up well in baked goods.
Making pistachio flour yourself allows you to source the freshest, highest quality nuts you can find (fresher nuts are going to be greener no matter what kind they are, not to mention have a brighter, fresher pistachio flavor).
After endless searching and hundreds of dollars wasted on sub-par pistachios (never trust an online photo to accurately depict realistic color), I’ve finally found a reliable source for bright green pistachios (since I don’t believe in secrets, I used these slivered Turkish pistachios along with some of these dark green Iranian pistachio kernels – not sponsored, not even an affiliate link, I bought these straight out [🤑🤑🤑] and will continue to do so because they are literally the best and brightest pistachios I’ve found).
I then set about using these gorgeous pistachios to make my own pistachio flour. I though it’d be a tedious process (and if you have to blanch and peel your nuts, it still is), but the flour itself was actually way quicker and easier than I anticipated. I don’t think I’ll ever buy pistachio flour again!
You can use a food processor or high-powered blender to make homemade pistachio flour (with a dry canister if you have one).
But my favorite appliance for making homemade pistachio flour by far is a blade coffee/spice grinder. These bullet-shaped grinders do a great job at getting a very fine grind (as they are coffee grinders, it makes sense why). They also work with much smaller quantities than food processors typically do (on the flip side, if you’re wanting to make a huge batch of pistachio flour you’ll definitely need to work in batches). I find about 1/4-1/2 cup of whole nuts to be the perfect amount for the grinder at one time.
If your grinder has been used previously for strong flavored spices or coffee, be sure to clean it out very well before you start so you don’t get any undesirable flavors in your pistachio flour. After washing, I find grinding up some plain uncooked rice does a great job removing any excess oils or flavors from coffee or spices. I have a separate grinder dedicated to not-coffee things; I mainly use it for freeze dried fruit, and now pistachio flour.
What Kind of Pistachios to use?
To make the greenest homemade pistachio flour, I recommend seeking out slivered Turkish pistachios or dark green Iranian pistachios. Both of these varieties come already peeled, meaning you can skip the extra steps of blanching, peeling, and drying, saving yourself a boatload of time. In my opinion this makes the high cost well worth it (time is money after all!)
My second choice would be raw Turkish pistachios, which tend to be greener than the California variety. Whether you blanche and peel them is up to you (the resulting flour will just have a darker color with more brown specks otherwise).
Don’t use pre-roasted and especially not roasted and salted nuts for this recipe, save those for snacking!
The various kinds of pistachios I’ve tried, in order of greenness, from most green to least green:
- dark green Iranian (far right)
- slivered Turkish (second from right)
- blanched and peeled Turkish or California (second from left – pictured is a blend of blanched Turkish and California nuts, I think it would’ve been greener had it been all Turkish)
- raw shelled Turkish (far left)
- in-shell California, shelled fresh
- raw shelled California
- roasted shelled California
I wasn’t able to find a good source for Sicilian pistachios, but I think they’d be comparable in greenness to the Iranian and Turkish varieties.
My final batch of flour as pictured (which ultimately went into a flourless pistachio cake) was a blend of the dark green Iranian and slivered Turkish pistachios.
While the dark green pistachios made beautiful flour, when I tested them in homemade pistachio butter I was not a fan (I found the flavor too piney). But for flour they were perfect, not to mention they came pre-peeled, same for the slivered ones, which saved me so much time.
Step by Step:
To make homemade pistachio flour, after preparing your pistachios (blanching/peeling/drying – more on that below), grind pistachios in a few short bursts of your coffee/spice grinder or food processor.
You don’t want to do long pulses or too many pulses at a time or the nuts will start to warm up and release their oils, transforming from a fine, granular flour into a clumpy lumpy mass (at this point you’re half way to making pistachio butter, basically, and unfortunately there’s no way to reverse it so you may as well just keep grinding and enjoy your homemade pistachio butter). We don’t want that, so stick to just a few very short pulses (in my grinder that meant 2 to 3 MAX, a food processor with a larger quantity of nuts could probably handle a few more.)
Dump the ground nuts into a sifter or sieve and sift over a bowl to catch the fine flour.
Put the remaining bits that are too large to sift back in the grinder (you can add more nuts if you have them at this point) and give them a few more pulses, then sift again.
Repeat this process until you have less than a tablespoon or two of larger bits left (too small a quantity to grind further). You can save the leftover bits as a decorative garnish to sprinkle on top of whatever it is you’re baking, or save them for a batch of pistachio butter later.
Wouldn’t you know it, you can pretty much use this exact same process (including the blanching and peeling part) to make homemade almond or hazelnut flour too!
Blanching & Peeling
While blanching and peeling your pistachios is an optional step, it will give you a more brightly colored flour with a cleaner flavor. Leaving the skins on will add brown speckles to the flour.
To blanch pistachios, submerge in boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain and immediately transfer to an ice bath to halt the cooking process. Drain again, spread onto paper towels, then peel.
The peeling part can be tedious, I won’t lie. Try rubbing the blanched nuts between paper towels or a tea towel first, sometimes the friction alone will remove a good part of the skins. But you’ll still probably need to come in after and manually pick off the rest of the skins. Some pistachios and pistachio varieties are easier to peel than others, generally the fresher the nut the easier it will be to peel.
Drying
The best pistachio flour is made from dry pistachios. Pistachios that still have some moisture in them or are very oily will not grind as well and the resulting flour will be coarse and clumpy, not fine and powdery like we want.
If you’ve blanched and peeled your pistachios, they will have absorbed quite a bit of water and will definitely need to be dried out before you can make flour.
If your pistachios were stored in the freezer (pistachios keep much longer in the freezer), but frozen nuts may feel a bit soft when you take them out. If you can bend one in half and it sort of mushes or crumbles instead of breaking, this is the sign of a too-soft nut. Frozen nuts are usually ok spread on a baking sheet and left out to air dry overnight.
To dry out soft pistachios, bake in a 250°F oven for 30 minutes, stirring a few times to be sure it dries out evenly. I then turn the oven off and let the pistachios cool in the oven for another hour or so or even overnight; by that point they should be completely dried out and cool.
You can also use a dehydrator if you have one, or turn your oven to the lowest temperature (usually about 170°F), and bake for 3 to 4 hours, then turn off the oven completely and leave them overnight to cool in the cooling oven.
Note that this only works for removing excess moisture from pistachios. If your pistachios are particularly oily they’re not going to make very good flour, and no amount of drying will change that. You can try grinding the oily nuts with a little bit of wheat flour, powdered sugar, or cornstarch to help absorb the excess oil, but this doesn’t always work and it may also affect the final recipe in which it will be used.
Be sure to let the nuts cool completely before you start to grind them. If you recall from my homemade pistachio butter recipe, warming the nuts helps release their oils and form a smoother butter. Since that is not what we want here, you want to be sure the nuts are fully cooled before you start to grind them.
How much do you need? I found that approximately 1 ¼ cups of raw shelled or slivered pistachios yielded about 1 cup of sifted flour (about 110 grams), but I recommend grinding a bit more than you need just in case.
Storage
Store pistachio flour in an airtight bag or container (or vacuum sealed if you have the equipment) in a cool, dark, and dry place for up to 1 month, or in the refrigerator.
You can also freeze pistachio flour for up to 6 months (freezing helps keep the oils in the flour from going rancid). I actually freeze my raw pistachios as well as my pistachio flour; they’re too expensive to let them go bad, and the freezer will keep them fresher longer.
Homemade Pistachio Flour
Ingredients
- 1 ¼ cups / 150 g raw shelled pistachios
Instructions
- Prepare pistachios: If your pistachios still have their skins, and you want a brighter green color, blanch in boiling water for 30 seconds then transfer to an ice bath briefly before draining and peeling. Spread out on a baking tray and let dry overnight, or in a 250ºF oven for 30 minutes to remove any remaining moisture, taking care not to let the nuts get brown. Let cool completely before grinding. (If you're using pre-peeled, slivered pistachios, or if you don't care about having brownish specks in your pistachio flour, you can skip this step. )
- Working in small batches, pulse pistachios in a food processor or clean coffee grinder. Give it 2-3 brief pulses, don't overdo it or the pistachios will warm and start to release their oils (which means they are on their way to becoming pistachio butter). Once they get oily, there's no fixing it, unfortunately.
- Dump ground pistachios into a sifter or sieve, then sift over a bowl. The fine flour will fall into the bowl, and you'll be left with a sifter full of the larger pieces.
- Transfer these larger bits back into your grinder, adding more nuts if you have more to grind. Repeat the process, pulsing just a few times then sifting, until all the nuts are finely ground.
- You'll probably end up with a tablespoon or two of coarsely ground nuts that aren't enough to grind again; you can save these to sprinkle on top as a garnish for whatever you are making, or set them aside to make homemade pistachio butter later.
- Pistachio flour should be stored in a cool, dry, and dark location, sealed in an airtight container or jar, or in the fridge where it'll keep for 2-3 months. For longer storage I recommend vacuum sealing and freezing for up to a year.
