I was revisiting smoked peanuts. The next step was a celery and celery root soup, blending sous vide celery with pressure-cooked celery root. Sure, the combination of celery and peanuts is common enough, but smoking the peanuts is an inevitable step forward. Then I started thinking green and I jumped to pistachios. I have not had, nor seen, smoked pistachios and felt they would be delicious. The next spark came from the pistachio shells. What if we used the shells to generate the smoke for the smoked pistachios? That would be a good use of a normally discarded product and the idea made sense. Rogue River Creamery smokes their blue cheese over the shells of hazelnuts, a pretty smart idea. Since I wanted to generate smoke with the aroma of pistachios, I opted to char the nuts in the shells. The smoke which was generated was delicate and rich with the aroma of roasted pistachios.
We did not do anything beyond creating the pistachio smoke today. It immediately prompted further thoughts to pursue. The charred whole pistachios produced a dark roasted pistachio flavor which, while not aesthetically beautiful, makes up for it tenfold in taste. We will pursue several infusions with this element. Also, we will begin pulverizing the nuts before smoke generation to increase the surface area of burnable material as well as the speed at which smoke may be produced. While we will end up smoking pistachios with pistachios, I believe pistachio-smoked fish and vegetables will also be amazing.
I then return to the dish I started with, which has now taken shape. Both the fish and the nuts will be smoked with pistachio, in this case, red snapper. We may then pair the smoked snapper with tender smoked pistachios and serve it with the celery-celery root puree and batons of celery. As an aside, foie gras and monkfish liver would not be too bad pistachio smoked. Since we have explored this nut, which others should we crack next?
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