So how come? Why the toxic waste shade of green for a nut-flavored ice cream?
That’s blue raspberry. My favorite flavor in the whole world.
Most manufacturers normally make their raspberry flavor a slightly darker shade of red then their strawberry.
Wow, Wikipedia is my friend this morning!
Blue raspberry:
Naturally, the article lacks cites, but at least the origin of that blue color isn’t totally lost in the vast dustbin of history.
Greenish, yes. But that doesn’t explain the bright green color. Dyes are added to achieve that startling (and unappetizing) pistachio ice cream shade.
Wouldn’t a subtle, natural shade of green (a greenish white, say) be more appealing?
You get blue raspberry for the same reason you get white pineapple - to distinguish that flavor from other fruits with the same natural color.
I’ve made pistachio ice cream. There are three layers of “shell” on a pistachio; the hard outer shell, and a couple layers of “paper” on the inside. The usual way you get rid of that is to blanch the nuts – dip 'em in boiling water for a minute or so. After the blanch and a rinse in cold water, the paper and outer membrane rub right off (which isn’t meant to minimize the amount of work, since they’re small and you need a lot of them.)
The resulting nutmeat is startlingly bright green – roughly the color of the the ice creams you see. The nuts aren’t enough to color the ice cream (natural pistachio ice cream is while with green/brown specs)–I’m not denying that they color it. But the nuts do have a much brighter color after cooking than they do raw.
The pistachio ice creams that I buy (Ben & Jerry’s; Haagen Dazs) are mildly green-tinted white, not lurid food-coloring green.
As folks’ preferences move away from artificial colors and towards the natural / original, manufacturers and producers will follow suit.
But blue raspberry isn’t raspberry flavored…it’s blue flavored. Take this from someone who dislikes raspberry but LOVES anything blue raspberry flavored.
(My house is filled with blue stuff. Blue jello, blue kool aid, blue Go Gurt (cuz they don’t make regular yogurt in blue)…but nothing raspberry.
Seeing that blue stuff in a toilet bowl then being offered blue kool aid…“Um… not thirsty, thanks.”
Definitely. When I was a girl [woo-woo fuzz flashback effect], pistachios came with red-dyed shells. Why? Because. Starting maybe 25 years ago you’d occasionally see the natural colored shells; then about 50-50; then the red gradually disappeared, to the extent that I haven’t seen them in years.[/wwffe]
The compounds that give blackberries (and presumably the very closely related blue raspberries) their deep purple colour are sensitive to acidity; mix them with a mildly acidic solution and the juice is deep wine red; mix them with a mildly alkaline solution and the juice turns dark navy/indigo - I’ve observed this many a time when washing up the blackberry pie dish.
They did that to cover imperfections (they dyed the shells red or green on the ‘seconds’) but as the machinery and growing have improved they haven’t needed to do this as much. You can still find them in December if you look, and you may be able to find them year round in candy and nut shops.
There’s another factor why the red and white dyed pistachios are no longer seen in the U.S. – they’re from Iran. Pistachios are common there, and they have to be cracked open by hand so a lot of cheap labor is needed for processing them. The coloring, as you said, was to hide unattractive mottling of the shell caused (somehow) by hand-picking. California growers came up with another variety that was self-cracking, and, being harvested by machine, was not nearly so mottled so no need to color them. They had tough going (“Those pistachios look weird!”) until the Iran hostage crisis. Suddenly we weren’t interested in importing Iranian pistachios any more.