Pistachio Nougat

Welcome to Day 4 of Blogmas At Home 2025! 🎄🎀✨

Once upon a time, my family went on holiday to the south of France. We visited Carcassonne, which is a fortified city that is very popular with tourists and bought some nougat from a chocolate shop. Immediately, we were hooked.

During lockdown, I dedicated myself to recreating the nougat at home. Naturally, I fell deep down the nougat rabbit hole. It turns out, not all nougats are made equal: there are hard, brittle versions; soft, fluffy versions; dense, chocolate-y versions and many, many more. I am pretty certain that the nougat we had is called (or is at least similar to) Nougat de Montélimar, which is soft, thick and chewy (sounds right, anyway!).

Anyway, I digress. After, a bit of trialling and testing, I finally have my perfect nougat recipe. My favourite flavour on the trip was the pistachio one, so I’m sharing the recipe for a pistachio nougat today!

Table of Contents

• Equipment
• Ingredients
• Making the Nougat
• Storage Instructions
• Tips & Tricks
• Recipe

Equipment

Making sweets/candy usually requires some specialist equipment to make sure everything goes smoothly. Here is the equipment that you’ll need to make this nougat:

• Candy thermometer

A candy thermometer is a MUST for this recipe. The sugar syrup needs to reach a specific temperature (140°C) to achieve the perfect, soft and chewy texture. There are other ways that you can test the temperature of the syrup, but they can be a bit of a faff and are nowhere near as accurate. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, I’d strongly recommend buying one for this recipe (you can use it for so many other recipes too!). I like to use a probe thermometer, because they’re super accurate and easy to clean!

• Stand mixer

Another must: this recipe requires 15 whole minutes (yes, really) of full-speed whisking. You do not want to be doing that by hand, even if you have an electric hand whisk!

• Rolling pin

To get the nougat perfectly smooth and even, it’s rolled out between two sheets of wafer paper. To do this, you need a rolling pin (though, if you don’t have one, you could always use a wine bottle)!.

• Spatula

Nougat is sticky, particularly when it’s warm, so a spatula (lightly greased with oil) will be your best friend.

• Flat-edged wooden spoon

You need a really strong implement to stir the nuts through the nougat (it’s super stiff!) and my preference is a flat-edged wooden spoon. The flat edge makes it really easy to get right down to the bottom of bowl and make sure no nougat goes to waste. A regular wooden spoon will also work, though, if that’s what you have.

Ingredients

To make pistachio nougat, you will need the following ingredients:

• Wafer paper

This is a specialist ingredient, but you can find it online (I used this one, from Amazon). It’s typically sold in A4 sheets and you’ll need 2 sheets for this recipe. Nougat can get sticky, so a sheet of wafer paper is placed underneath and on top of the slab to make it easier to manage/eat later on!

• Pistachios

I’ve used whole pistachios in this nougat (to make it pistachio nougat), but you can use different nuts if you prefer. You could even do a combination of nuts, such as pistachios and almonds.

• Caster sugar

I used golden caster sugar for my nougat, but white caster sugar would work just as well.

• Honey

Honey is a key ingredient for this style of nougat: it adds flavour and helps to achieve that perfect, chewy texture.

• Water

Is water an ingredient? I suppose so, when it needs to be measured precisely! The water is combined with the sugar and honey to form a syrup, which is whisked together with the egg whites.

• Egg whites

Egg whites form the base of the nougat. You don’t need the yolks for this recipe, so you can use them for something else!

• Green food colouring

This is optional, but I like to add green food colouring to this nougat recipe, just to really drive home the whole ‘pistachio’ thing. You can leave it out, or you can use a different colour, instead. I used the Aqua Blend food colouring from Colour Mill in the shade Forest, but I’ve used other food colourings in the past and they worked absolutely fine.

• Sunflower oil

As I mentioned, nougat gets sticky, so it’s handy to have a little oil to hand to grease your spatula/knife. I’ve used sunflower, but any flavourless oil will work. It just helps you to work with the nougat without it getting stuck to anything and everything!

Making the Nougat

The first step when making this nougat is to toast the pistachios (or whichever nuts you’re using). I like to just give them a gentle toast, so they taste extra delicious but still keep their vibrant green colour. Just put them in a dry pan over medium-high heat for a few minutes, giving them a shake every now and then, until they’re smelling nutty. Once they’re toasted, remove them from the pan and set them aside to cool while you make the nougat.

Place the sugar, honey and water into a large saucepan. Set the pan over medium heat and allow the sugar to melt. Try not to stir it too much once it’s on the heat (you don’t want the sugar to crystallise!).

While the sugar is melting, place the egg whites and 10-15 drops of food colouring (if using) in the metal bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with the whisk attachment. Adding the food colouring at this stage means you’ll get a more even colour throughout the nougat, but, as the nougat whips, the colour will become much less vibrant, so you need more than you think! You can always add more later though, if needed (and I did need to because, at this stage, I added a grand total of 3 drops to my nougat, which left it looking practically snow white). Leave this to the side, ready to whisk later on.

Once the sugar has melted, keep the syrup over the heat and monitor the temperature of it with a candy thermometer. You’re aiming for it to reach 140°C.

Once the sugar reaches approximately 130°C (at this point it will be bubbling away nicely!), turn the stand mixer up to high speed and whisk the egg whites until they reach stiff peaks.

You don’t want to do this too early, or the egg whites will collapse before the syrup is ready. Similarly, you don’t want to leave it too late, or the syrup will cool down too much before the egg whites are ready! I find that 130°C is a pretty good sweet spot.

Once the sugar reaches 140°C, remove the pan from the heat. With the mixer still running on high, pour the syrup into the beaten egg whites in a slow, steady stream down the side of the bowl.

Turn the mixer up to full speed and leave it to whisk for about 15 minutes, or until the nougat is thick, stiff and beginning to tear. The nougat will still be warm (and the metal bowl pretty hot) at this point, so be careful when you handle it!

You can see in the photo above what happens when you add the food colouring at this stage (as opposed to with the egg whites): there’s a clear colour divide in the bowl! Luckily, the colours mix together pretty easily with a wooden spoon and a bit of elbow grease, so don’t worry too much.

From now on, work quite quickly, as the nougat will become harder to work with the cooler it gets. Tip in the toasted, cooled pistachios.

Use a flat-bottomed wooden spoon to mix them into the nougat, making sure to get right down to the bottom of the bowl.

Place one sheet of the wafer paper onto a clean work surface. Tip the nougat on top of the wafer paper.

Use a lightly oiled spatula to press the nougat down slightly.

Place the second sheet of wafer paper right on top of the nougat and smooth it out with your hands. Use a rolling pin to roll out the nougat to your desired thickness (mine was about 2.5cm/1 inch thick, but you can go as thick/thin as you want!).

Set the nougat aside at room temperature for a couple of hours to cool down, then transfer the slab to an airtight container and leave it overnight to firm up completely.

Once it’s set, you can trim off any excess paper with a pair of scissors and cut it into bitesize squares with a large knife, ready to enjoy! If you find that the nougat is sticking to your knife, you can lightly grease the knife with a little more flavourless oil to help prevent this.

Storage Instructions

The nougat keeps really well, so you can make it in advance. Store it in an airtight container at room temperature and it will be fine for up to 1 month, ready for giving to your friends/family as presents or just enjoying throughout the festive season!

Tips & Tricks

• Colouring the nougat

The easiest time to add food colouring to nougat is at the start, before you whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks, because it will ensure that the nougat is evenly tinted. However, it can be really hard to tell how much you need at this stage, because the colour will get significantly paler once the nougat is whisked. Luckily, you can always add more colouring later on (you’ll just have to mix in any residual, paler streaks in by hand!).

• Oil

Lightly oiling your utensils (particularly the spatula you use to transfer the nougat from the bowl to the wafer paper and the knife you use to cut the nougat before serving) is super helpful, because it prevents the nougat from sticking to them. I’d definitely recommend keeping some oil on hand to save your sanity!

• Washing up

Nougat is sticky (have I mentioned that enough times?), so washing up all of the bowls and pans can seem a bit daunting! The important thing to remember, though, is that nougat is mainly sugar and sugar dissolves in water. Just fill the mixer bowl and saucepan with hot, soapy water, submerge all of the other nougat-y/syrupy utensils in the bowl/pan and leave for 5-10 minutes. It’ll be so much easier to clean afterwards!

Recipe