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Chestnuts roasting on a, on a......


GordonCooks

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I don't know how hot for how long, but I have a related question. I picked up a jar of French Chestnuts at W-S. Now what to do with them? Any ideas for soups, purees...or anything else appreciated.

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You really need an open fire, or a charcoal brazier and a cockney accent.

Its part of the romance...

Score the chestnuts or they will explode. I guess 20 minutes in a hot dry frying pan, shaking and turning from time to time. Eat with salt.

For cooking it is MUCH easier to to tinned puree or sous-vide packed whole chestnuts. Merchant Gourmet is one brand that Tesco sells. Soups, stuffings, deserts (Mount Blanc or chestnut meringues and creams), or tossed with Brussel sprouts, candied as Marron Glace etc etc

More on http://www.merchant-gourmet.com/osb/itemdetails.cfm/ID/522

I've never managed to use dried chestnuts successfully, but that can be ground to flour and used in breads etc.

Edited by jackal10 (log)
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I just make an "x" in the bottom skin, throw em in pie tin, and roast at about 350F or so - watch them, because they will burn.

I'm guessing 15 minutes will get it done, but it's been a year since I've made them, so I'm out of practice.

If you smell burning, they've gone too long. :biggrin:

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I just make an "x" in the bottom skin, throw em in pie tin, and roast at about 350F or so - watch them, because they will burn.

I'm guessing 15 minutes will get it done, but it's been a year since I've made them, so I'm out of practice.

If you smell burning, they've gone too long. :biggrin:

Noted - smoke = bad

I guess I'll start watching them after about 10 mins. For some reason, I think I'm going to throw them on the grill outside

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I don't know how hot for how long, but I have a related question. I picked up a jar of French Chestnuts at W-S. Now what to do with them? Any ideas for soups, purees...or anything else appreciated.

Make sure they're not sweetened or in sugar syrup.

Simmer them in milk with a little rosemary or sage. They'll absorb the milk and get very soft (20-30 minutes or so). Mash (don't discard the milk left in the pan) and serve as-is or mix with mashed potatoes.

The mashed chestnuts can be thinned out with stock and made into a soup with whole chestnuts as a garnish. You can also use the mash to stuff pasta, or blanched cabbage leaves and baked.

Good for you going with the canned kind. I always feel sheepish reading cookbooks where the author implores you that fresh peeled are really the way to go. But the first couple years I used whole chestnuts I could never peel them fast enough out of the oven and the inner skin enclosing the actual nut would get stiff and brittle and jam up under my fingernails. Oh, and then there's the nasty gash on my index finger when my knife slipped on their rounded skin while scoring them . . . Not worth the effort, no matter what the flavor tradeoff is.

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I just make an "x" in the bottom skin, throw em in pie tin, and roast at about 350F or so - watch them, because they will burn.

I'm guessing 15 minutes will get it done, but it's been a year since I've made them, so I'm out of practice.

If you smell burning, they've gone too long. :biggrin:

Noted - smoke = bad

I guess I'll start watching them after about 10 mins. For some reason, I think I'm going to throw them on the grill outside

Similar to what people have mentioned above, can do in oven for ~ 10-15 min at 400 deg. Shaking every now and then to turn them over. (And score before cooking).

My parents had a grill basket type thing for roasting them over coals in the fire place as well... With that you can also shake them to turn them in the heat.

"Under the dusty almond trees, ... stalls were set up which sold banana liquor, rolls, blood puddings, chopped fried meat, meat pies, sausage, yucca breads, crullers, buns, corn breads, puff pastes, longanizas, tripes, coconut nougats, rum toddies, along with all sorts of trifles, gewgaws, trinkets, and knickknacks, and cockfights and lottery tickets."

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1962 "Big Mama's Funeral"

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For the holidays I like to make a butternut squash/chestnut soup. Peel, seed and cut into chunks a large squash. Add a can of drained chestnuts, a chopped onion and cover with chicken stock. Cook til done. Add S*P, a little nutmet and/or allspice and puree in a blender or food processor. There are many variations on this theme.

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Slit them and bake at about 350 for up to a half hour. My wife lives off of these. In her home country (Albania) they have chestnut stands like we have hotdog stands.

Food network had a great recipe a while back for a bacon/chestnut ravioli sauteed in sage butter. It was outstanding. I'll probably try it again this year.

Edited by majkeli (log)

Soup is good food.

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I would score them and throw them in the oven until the skin starts to peel back. Shelling them is a pain in the ass, but they tasted good purred in a soup with tuffle butter.

Ya-Roo Yang aka "Bond Girl"

The Adventures of Bond Girl

I don't ask for much, but whatever you do give me, make it of the highest quality.

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Slit them and bake at about 350 for up to a half hour.  My wife lives off of these.  In her home country (Albania) they have chestnut stands like we have hotdog stands. . . .

Oh, man, you make me nostalgic -- we used to have roast-chestnut carts here in NYC, but they seem to have disappeared. Even though the chestnuts weren't that great (at least 1/3 of them were moldy when you finally got them shelled :raz: ), the smell was fabulous, and you knew that winter was just around the corner. Now the charcoal brazier set-ups are just used for crappy frozen pretzels. :angry:

As for the packaged chestnuts -- at Dufour, we made a chestnut strudel, sort of sweet/savory, with chopped celery and onions, and the (frozen peeled) chestnuts were softened by boiling in water with brown sugar. It was one of my favorite items. :smile:

Another thing you can do with them (again, if they are not sweetened) is mash them and use them instead of potatoes for gnocchi. As a side with game, with a little brown butter, YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

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I usually soak the chestnuts in water first for an hour or so, and then it's easier to score the flat side of the chestnuts with X's. Then I spread them on a baking sheet, "X" side up, and bake them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. The points made by the X's should open up and peel back -- very festive looking!

The larger you make the X's, the easier the chestnuts will be to peel after baking.

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Do any of these roasting techniques prevent the inner skin from clinging to the chestnut meats? I usually roast 25 minutes at 425 with Xes cut into my chesnuts, but at least 1/2 of them have the skins still clinging to them.

And majkeli, was this the Food network recipe you spoke of earlier?

Believe me, I tied my shoes once, and it was an overrated experience - King Jaffe Joffer, ruler of Zamunda

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Oh, man, you make me nostalgic -- we used to have roast-chestnut carts here in NYC, but they seem to have disappeared.

You can get roasted chestnuts on Main St. in Flushing.

Michael aka "Pan"

 

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I love freshly roasted chestnuts! There are trucks popping up all over the place now over here.

I didn't realize about the scoring the first time I roasted them (over a campfire), they were exploding all over the place we barely got to eat any! :blink:

Kristin Wagner, aka "torakris"

 

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I don't know how hot for how long, but I have a related question. I picked up a jar of French Chestnuts at W-S. Now what to do with them? Any ideas for soups, purees...or anything else appreciated.

Every year at Thanksgiving we serve a bacon and creamed chestnut dish. It's very simple. Puree your chestnuts with cream. Add bacon, cover with foil, and and bake at about 400f/200c until it's bubbling and yummy looking. Sometimes we top with grated cheese and let that brown on top.

Another thing you can do with them is to pack them in sugar syrup and serve them with ice cream. :rolleyes:

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I don't know how hot for how long, but I have a related question. I picked up a jar of French Chestnuts at W-S. Now what to do with them? Any ideas for soups, purees...or anything else appreciated.

This came up on a Thanksgiving thread, in response to me asking what do you do with chestnut puree? Sounded interesting to me:

I think this is a version of Mount Blanc aux Marrons, which is a delicious chestnut/cream desert.

Daniel Rogov's recipe

Some pipe the chestnut puree onto a meringue base, before topping with whipped cream to simulate the snowy peak.

The easy way is to use tinned chestnut puree, which can be bought for about the same price as raw chestnuts. In the local supermarket raw chestnuts are £3/kilo (about $2/lb), while Merchant Gourmet brand  tinned Chestnut Puree is £3.41/kilo (say an extra 40c/lb) I'm very happy to pay 40c to avoid the peeling!

All these ideas are making me want to do something savory or savory sweet with chestnuts for the holidays, seems they would be good with lamb me thinks.

I like the butternut squash/chestnut pureed soup and the streudel ideas especially when thinking of pairing with leg of lamb.

Judith Love

North of the 30th parallel

One woman very courteously approached me in a grocery store, saying, "Excuse me, but I must ask why you've brought your dog into the store." I told her that Grace is a service dog.... "Excuse me, but you told me that your dog is allowed in the store because she's a service dog. Is she Army or Navy?" Terry Thistlewaite

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Thanks for all the delicious sounding ideas. (This jar of chestnuts I picked up contains only peeled chestnuts -- no syrup, no nothing else.) I think I'll try the butternut squash-chestnut soup first. It is clearly calling to me. What ratio of chestnuts to squash do you all think? Two and one-half to three parts squash to one part chestnut?

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As posted elsewhere:

While putting up preserves over the summer, I came across a recipe for Chestnut Jam with Vanilla and Rum, which sounded so good that I determined to make some as soon as I could get good chestnuts. On Monday, I found chestnuts at the grocery store and bought 6 lbs. On Tuesday, I peeled 6 lbs. of chestnuts. On Wednesday, I made (and canned) about 8 pints of the most luscious chestnut cream imaginable. Recipe and method follow.

Theory:

Recipe paraphrased from Hillaire Walden

Chestnut Jam with Vanilla and Rum

± 2 3/4 LBS unpeeled chestnuts

1 vanilla bean

3 C light brown sugar

2 TBSP dark rum

Peel the chestnuts however you see fit.

Put peeled chestnuts and vanilla bean in large sauce pan and just cover with water. Cover pan and bring to a boil; simmer until chestnuts are tender (about 30 min.). Remove and set aside vanilla bean. Drain chestnuts, reserving cooking liquid. Purée chestnuts. There should be about 2 2/3 cups of purée.

Put purée, sugar, and 7 tablespoons reserved cooking liquid in heavy pan. Split vanilla bean and scrape out seeds; add seeds and bean to pan. Heat mixture gently, stirring, until sugar is dissolved, then raise heat and boil until mixture is thick. Remove and discard vanilla bean; stir in rum.

Ladle hot jam into sterilized jars, seal, and process in water bath.

Practice:

Because I had 6 lbs. of chestnuts, I planned on approximately doubling the recipe. So I used 2 vanilla beans.

The reserved liquid was required at the purée step – all of it, plus about a cup of tap water – elsewise, puréeing would have been impossible. Even so, the purée was as thick as good mashed potatoes. And there was closer to 10 cups of it (not 5 1/3, as would have been expected [if the original recipe was accurate]).

The purée, at this point, seemed a little rough, and there were specks of chopped peel in it, since thoroughly peeling a chestnut is nearly impossible. For mortals, anyway. So I took the extra and compulsive step of working the paste through a very fine tamis. The result was a perfectly velvety salaciously smooth purée.

If I were to have followed the proportions of the recipe, my reckoning is that I should have used upwards of 2 lbs. of sugar – which seemed excessive to me. So I decided to start with a pound. So I put the purée and the scraped-out vanilla beans and 1 pound of (dark) brown sugar into the pot, along with about a cup of water and a generous pinch of salt. And I whisked it well until it was smoothly combined. And I tasted it...and the sugar level seemd just right. Any more, and you wouldn't have tasted the chestnuts. In retrospect, I would probably use light brown sugar if I were to make it again (which there is every possibility of).

As for boiling the mixture until thick: it already seemed reasonably thick, so I only boiled it for about 15 minutes. And anyway, thickness in this case is entirely subjective. I tried to imagine how thick I'd want my chestnut "jam", and how I'd use it (and I didn't get much farther the "Hmm. Um, eat it off a spoon?") and I just kind of intuited a not-very-thick chestnut "jam".

For rum, I used Cruzan Black Strap Rum, which seemed to finish the deal just right.

Well. So. Then I canned it. Put it up in pretty little hex-jars with gold-tone lids. And I'll gift the very special with it come the hols. And eat no small amount of it myself, no doubt. I can hardly describe how good it is.

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At the Sunday market in Marin, chestnuts are sold and roasted right across from my booth by the Boughton Farm.

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I get them all the time. The skins fall off easily once roasted and his are so fresh, I've never had an off one.

Visit beautiful Rancho Gordo!

Twitter @RanchoGordo

"How do you say 'Yum-o' in Swedish? Or is it Swiss? What do they speak in Switzerland?"- Rachel Ray

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There's info on this very topic in today's NYTimes food section! They mention a new gadget called a Chestnutter...full story is at the bottom of this page!

X Marks the Perfect Spot for Easy Chestnuts

"I'm not eating it...my tongue is just looking at it!" --My then-3.5 year-old niece, who was NOT eating a piece of gum

"Wow--this is a fancy restaurant! They keep bringing us more water and we didn't even ask for it!" --My 5.75 year-old niece, about Bread Bar

"He's jumped the flounder, as you might say."

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That Chestnutter is a bit pricey but I'm rather tempted. The scoring is so tedious. I've developed a method there I place the chestnuts hump side up and whack the X into them with a Chinese cleaver. It's much faster than scoring on the flat side, especially since I don't need them to look pretty, but means I often whack into the nut as much as the shell--making it somewhat harder to peel.

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It's expensive? The article said it's $12.98 at Zabar's...I'd think that anywhere else, it might be even a few dollars less!

"I'm not eating it...my tongue is just looking at it!" --My then-3.5 year-old niece, who was NOT eating a piece of gum

"Wow--this is a fancy restaurant! They keep bringing us more water and we didn't even ask for it!" --My 5.75 year-old niece, about Bread Bar

"He's jumped the flounder, as you might say."

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The Chestnutter is a brilliant idea! I'm thinking I need to pay a visit to Zabar's.

Of course, this morning when I showed it to Blovie, my ever practical husband wanted to know how one keeps the blades sharp.

"Some people see a sheet of seaweed and want to be wrapped in it. I want to see it around a piece of fish."-- William Grimes

"People are bastard-coated bastards, with bastard filling." - Dr. Cox on Scrubs

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