Hi Pistachio lovers,

Today, we bring you something different from the land of kangaroos, strange looking trucks (called Utes here), meat pies, and of course the scary and sneaky drop bears… Today pistachio lovers, we give you a review of caramel coated pistachios.

This is a first even for us. Usually we stay away from sweet nuts. Usually, when we think about pistachios, we imagine salty roasted crackful nuts with a delicate and measured amount of salt crystals covering the surface of these magical creation… Our experience with pistachios that tasted sweet was an utter failure. It’s usually a sign of lack of freshness or additives.. but how about pistachios that are intentionally sweet with a healthy dose of sweet sweet caramel?

We were walking one day in the general region of Perth, Australia and found a store selling all sorts of nuts. Who would we be if we didn’t go in to see if they had pistachios? so of course we went in.

The store is called Morish Nuts and More …! It had a pretty inviting entrance with a nice striped floor, a well layed out store-front and it was pretty nice overall with a bunch of packages neatly stacked on the wall and tasting samples of all sorts.

After trying out a few samples, we decided to pick a Jumbo pack of caramel coated pistachios and headed out.

Packaging

The package is tall with elegant black stripes on a white background similar to the ones in the actual store floor. The front of the package has the name, a description and a third label “Hand Roasted to Perfection”. We’ll be putting this statement to the test.

Other items in the front of the packaging include statements informing the buyer that the product is gluten, preservative, colourant, and additive free. In the bottom of the front of the package, the logo of Morish nuts can be seen with a moto “Just one more”.

Let’s stop for a second and talk about the logo. It’s a peanut, with a top hat, a cane, a bow tie, and shoes.

It’s a cute logo, especially with it’s goofy grin – but it reminds us of a different logo form an American company called Planters. That logo is from Mr. Peanut and it seems quite ancient with variations existing from 1923! The Mr. Peanut logo has a monocle unlike its Australian cousin and seems a bit more “old-money” and “classy” than the goofier cousin.

The back of the packaging contains a sticker with standard the standard ingredient composition label describing the product as having 200g weight with 5 servings per package and ingredients including (pistachios, sugar, honey, tapioca, starch, and vanilla). It is also indicated the it is made in Australia from 100% Australian Ingredients. Our previous Australian pistachios were not that great but let’s dig into these.

Smell

When you tear open the package, the smells are pretty amazing…sweet but also pistachio-y and biscuit-y. A big change from the regular smell of salted roasted pistachios which are usually in the woody / dry notes.

Visual Aspect

Most of these are of a reasonable medium size. The good thing is that they are all unshelled so you can just snack away. The risk of course with the candy’s coating is that it’s hard to really visually inspect the nuts for any deformities, issues, bugs.. but overall they looked very nice and inviting.

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Taste

Super crunch, buiscuit-y, sweet, like a crunchy dessert but you can still tell they are pistachio. They reminded us of some candied peanuts that peanut sellers have in countries like Morocco and others. Very nice indeed but can be overbearing if you eat the whole bag. The pistachios seem of good quality and the pistachio flavour sometimes cuts through occasionally. There was one or two bad ones, but the caramel taste and sweetness hid that quite well. Overall, these pistachios taste of consistent sweet quality…but people who don’t have a sweet tooth might find them too much.

Basically these taste like nuggets of crunchy sweetness. This can’t be healthy.

Conclusions

Look, there are sweet pistachios. They taste good, sometimes too sweet but you get what you get. A sweet caramel candy crunchy taste and pistachios ! For people that love sweet things I’m sure this would be a great snack but maybe not for an everyday pistachio. They are somewhat addictiv but overall we kind of liked them !

We give these pistachios a 4.3.