I spend most of Monday touring some of the pistachio processing industry. While Turkey has a rather large crop, it does not resemble our pistachio industry. There is still a high amount of labor involved in the processing and none of the players in the industry has gone to the scale we have in California.
Above is how the pistachios are purchased from the local farmers, who bring their product in and unload them in the street in front of the desired company at the nut bazaar, which is more or less a wholesale business to business version of the retail bazaars one sees in other parts of the cities here. Of note is that the product must be unloaded and reloaded by hand.
Here are the pistachios being roasted. Machines are manually loaded and all the roasting is supervised with one worker per roasting drum. What looks like smoke is actually the steam coming from the pistachios as they are removed from the roaster.
Here is yet another example of the labor intensive process here. All the nuts are sorted by hand similar to this. They do not use electronic optical laser sorting machines and these photos were actually taken at the largest pistachio processor in the country. While their processing might not look like ours at home, the end results are no less impressive. They have a fantastic flavor profile and sell for even more than California pistachios. For the Turks, it really does seem to be all about the end result and as can be best summed up by one of my colleagues here, "In Turkey, we live to eat!" From what I sampled in the restaurants so far, they are doing well.
- Mike Poindexter
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