THE GREEN GOLD FROM SICILY: BRONTE PDO PISTACHIO
The Mediterranean has always been the sea of taste and a historic area of exchange between East and West, in fact it is precisely through the Mare Nostrum that the pistachio reached Italy. A fruit that comes from afar, from Persia and Turkey, and has taken root in Sicily, in particular in Bronte.
It is a very ancient plant, already known and cultivated by the Jews who considered it a very precious fruit. The cultivation of pistachio was then increased and experimented by the Arabs, who tore Sicily from the Byzantines who found on the island, in particular on the slopes of Etna, the natural habitat for a luxuriant and peculiar development of the plant. This is how the Bronte pistachio was born, whose notoriety has grown enormously over the years and, consequently, also the demand.
In 2009, the Bronte pistachio obtained the DOP protected designation of origin.
The Bronte pistachio owes its precious and unique characteristics to its territory: the union between the plant and the lava soil which, continuously fertilized by volcanic ash, gives rise to a fruit which, from the point of view of taste and aroma, exceeds the remaining world production in quality. The most important characteristic of the Bronte pistachio concerns the chlorophyll content, higher than other types of pistachio, and it is to this that its intense green color is due. In addition, the flavor is much more decisive, thanks to the characteristics of the soil, rich in minerals also due to the frequent lava flows of Etna.
It is less and less available on the market for obvious reasons such as the cost of high labor: the beans, in fact, are selected manually by choosing those with an open shell of at least a few millimeters, to allow the consumer to open the fruit with the fingernail and consume the product.
Harvesting takes place at the end of summer, between August and September, but only in alternate years: one year the harvest, the following year the buds are removed to protect the plant.
The cultivation and production of pistachio represent an important source of income for the Bronte people, so much so that it is nicknamed "green gold", due to its high commercial value. In Bronte, a town in the province of Catania, an infinite variety of products derived from pistachio processing are produced, such as the famous pistachio pesto for pasta sauce, pistachio ice cream, pistachio biscuits, pistachio cream , pistachio chocolate and many others.
In numerical terms, the Bronte pistachio represents over 90% of the Italian pistachio production and about 2% of the world production.
Buy now the pesto and the cream made of Bronte Pistachio
