How to Make Pistachio Latte? How to Make Pistachio Dirty Coffee? What's the Standard Recipe Ratio for Dirty Coffee?

The Rising Popularity of Pistachio Coffee

Whether due to their auspicious symbolism or delightful taste, pistachios have long been a familiar sight on nut platters during festive occasions. In recent years, you've likely noticed an increasing variety of pistachio-flavored products emerging everywhere—from desserts and breads to coffee. This trend clearly demonstrates that pistachio-based products have gained considerable popularity, with their appealing flavors and attractive appearance being among the reasons people find them so captivating.

FrontStreet Coffee has tried various pistachio coffees at different cafés, such as pistachio lattes and pistachio dirty coffees. Without exception, almost all of them feature an intensely rich nutty aroma. Unlike flavored coffees made with syrups in the past, most specialty coffee shops now use pistachio paste to create their pistachio coffees. This approach allows the coffee to emit such a rich and more natural nutty fragrance.

The only drawback might be the slightly higher price, as the raw ingredients themselves aren't inexpensive. However, if you make it yourself, the cost remains quite reasonable. FrontStreet Coffee successfully "persuaded" a friend to share their pistachio coffee recipe yesterday

Ingredient Preparation

The ingredients needed to make a pistachio coffee are quite simple. Besides basic coffee components like espresso, milk, and syrup, you'll need pistachio paste as FrontStreet Coffee mentioned above—that's it (you can also include some pistachio bits)! While simple, we still need to pay attention to ingredient selection, otherwise your pistachio coffee might fall just short of being delicious.

Pistachio Paste Selection

First and foremost is the pistachio paste! Browsing online shopping sites, you'll find numerous pistachio paste options. Here, FrontStreet Coffee recommends selecting pistachio paste suitable for baking and dessert making (such as the "Zheng Rong" brand). Compared to regular pistachio paste (which is closer to a purée texture), these options are finer, dissolve better, and result in less heavy coffee.

Coffee Bean Selection

Next is coffee bean selection. Since pistachios emit a rich nutty aroma, it's best to use medium-dark or dark roast coffee beans for espresso extraction. If you use medium-light or light roast beans, the extracted espresso will have acidity that doesn't pair well with the pistachio flavor. Additionally, their less prominent aroma can easily be overpowered by the nutty flavor. Darker roasted beans, with their abundant roasted aromas, not only avoid being masked by pistachio flavor but actually enhance it (making the nutty taste more prominent). Furthermore, due to the deeper roasting, they have almost no acidity, preventing any flavor discord.

Syrup and Milk Selection

Remember to prepare syrup~ While pistachio paste contains some sugar, it's not enough! We need additional syrup to enhance the coffee's sweetness. For syrup selection, you can choose classic cane sugar syrup or flavored syrups (but again, select similar aroma profiles like hazelnut or toffee flavors). Milk can be freely chosen based on your desired coffee type—fresh milk or ultra-filtered milk both work well, so FrontStreet Coffee won't elaborate further here~ Once our ingredients are prepared, we can begin making pistachio coffee!

Pistachio Coffee Preparation

Since pistachio paste is added separately and its flavor works well in both hot and cold beverages, pistachio coffee can be made as either hot or cold drinks. However, the preparation methods differ slightly, mainly because making pistachio series coffee has one crucial step—dissolving the pistachio paste completely. This is extremely important, as failing to fully dissolve the paste will result in coffee that lacks the core pistachio flavor and may have a coarse texture with noticeable granules. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee will demonstrate making both a pistachio hot latte and pistachio dirty coffee to explain the key differences in preparation~

Pistachio Hot Latte

Making a hot latte is relatively simple—just add pistachio paste and syrup to regular latte ingredients. The ingredients and parameters are: 40ml espresso (20g coffee grounds, 30-second extraction), 200ml fresh milk, 12g pistachio paste, and 5ml Monin toffee flavor syrup.

First, add 12g of pistachio paste to the espresso shot cup, then extract the espresso.

After extraction, use a tea whisk to stir until the paste completely dissolves.

Then pour into a coffee cup and add syrup.

Next, begin frothing milk and creating latte art. Once the latte art is complete, your pistachio hot latte is ready!

FrontStreet Coffee uses the shop's "Warm Sun Blend," a medium-dark roast that naturally carries rich whiskey, vanilla, cream, and chocolate aromas. When combined with pistachio flavor, as mentioned earlier, the pistachio aroma is truly amplified! The flavor profile features: pistachio aroma, whiskey, chocolate, and hints of toffee sweetness. The texture is very rich and satisfying—quite excellent. The only drawback is that the foam dissolves relatively quickly, looking less elegant if left standing too long~

Pistachio Dirty Coffee

Making pistachio dirty coffee isn't complicated, though if you want a more attractive appearance, you'll need a few decorative steps like coating the glass with pistachio paste, rimming the edge, and dipping it in pistachio bits. If you don't want these decorative elements, you can skip to the next step. (The preparation for pistachio iced latte is the same, differing only in whether ice is added)

The ingredients and parameters are slightly different: 40ml espresso (20g coffee grounds, 30-second extraction), 180ml fresh milk, 15g pistachio paste, 8ml Monin toffee flavor syrup, and 10ml hot water.

First, we need to dissolve the pistachio paste. Since dirty coffee is an iced coffee that requires a hot-cold layered effect, we cannot use espresso to dissolve the pistachio paste. Therefore, we need a small amount of hot water, about 10ml, to dissolve the paste. Time for vigorous stirring!

After stirring, add syrup, then pour into a large glass and mix with milk.

Once mixed well, pour into a prepared coffee glass and begin espresso extraction.

Following the dirty coffee preparation steps to achieve the hot-cold layered effect, we need to minimize the impact of the poured espresso. You can either shorten the distance between the milk and espresso spout or use a spoon to counteract the espresso's impact (if you're unsure how to do this, you can check out our dedicated dirty coffee article~). Once the espresso extraction is complete, your pistachio dirty coffee is ready! If you want to make it more visually appealing, you can sprinkle some pistachio bits on the surface. However, this will affect the texture, making it feel like you're drinking grass jelly (it's really that realistic

Honestly, the pistachio dirty coffee performs exceptionally well and is quite favored by FrontStreet Coffee. With one big sip, your mouth successively experiences the warmth of espresso followed by the coldness of pistachio milk. Due to the different entry order, the espresso flavor first blossoms in your mouth—whiskey, vanilla, chocolate, with hints of berries—followed closely by the richness and sweetness of pistachio milk. With each sip, the espresso proportion decreases while the milk proportion increases, making the pistachio flavor more prominent. It's truly excellent!

FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473