Eating Chestnuts

One of our goals is to help rebuild a vibrant regional food culture around perennial staple foods like chestnuts. We see you as an important partner in that effort, and we would love to hear from you about your experience working with these nuts! Please share feedback, recipes, the results of your experiments, what worked and didn’t work, and what you are learning about best ways to use this important climate-resilient food. If you are posting on social media about recipes or dishes, we welcome a tag @breadtreefarms.

If you’d like to download a printable pdf of these instructions, click here.

Storing Chestnuts

Chestnuts are perishable and have special needs for storing and handling.

How to Store Fresh Chestnuts

Fresh chestnuts in the shell can keep for several months in ideal conditions (34-36° F, moist but able to breathe). Store in semi-permeable containers like brown paper bags or perforated plastic bags. A sealed plastic bag or container will cause the nuts to mold from excess humidity. A bag that is wide open to the air will allow the nuts to dry out more quickly, shortening shelf life. You can always rehydrate nuts that have begun to dry out — just soak them in water overnight.

Long-Term Storage

If you want to store chestnuts for longer than a few months, do not freeze uncooked nuts in shell. Consider the following options:

Roast & Freeze: You can roast, shell, and freeze chestnuts, just like vegetables. When you thaw them, we recommend using them in stews or soups due to changes in texture.
Dry Whole Kernels: You can air dry the nuts completely, peel them, and store the kernels in the fridge for a long time. If they do not reach 18% moisture content (or lower), continue drying in dehydrator at 100-110° F until they do. When you’re ready to use them, rehydrate and cook by your preferred method.
Flour & Dried Products: Once dried, you can mill or grind chestnut kernels into a variety of textures for use as “rice”, porridge, polenta, or baking flour. We will also have chestnut flour for sale starting in 2025.
Ferment: Chestnut substitutes well for soy/chickpea/barley/etc. in miso.

Ensuring Quality

We want you to have the best possible experience eating our chestnuts! Before we make deliveries, we carefully grade nuts to ensure quality and eliminate defects. We encourage you to do a simple quality check on your fresh chestnuts when you receive them, every week during storage, and before you want to cook with them.

If (during shipping or in your fridge) you see superficial mold forming on the darker part of the shell, don’t just throw the nuts away — wash the nuts in salt water or 5% bleach solution, and cut a few open to check the kernel. Superficial mold is common, and very often the inside will still be good. If they look, smell, and taste good inside, they are good.

The lighter-colored round shape at the base of each chestnut is called the hilum. If you see some superficial spotting or mold on the hilum, that's OK — hilum spotting is common, and usually the nut itself is good. When in doubt, check the inside.

Steps Before Cooking

There are a few important steps to take before cooking and enjoying fresh chestnuts.

Curing

Before cooking chestnuts, we highly recommend you “air cure” them at room temperature. This ambient curing process allows starches to become sugars, which makes them taste better and peel more easily. A good curing setup is a basket, baking sheet, or wide tray. Avoid direct sunlight, heat, or forced air. 2-3 days is usually enough, but it’s not a fixed rule. Check daily on curing nuts by squeezing a few nuts — when they’ve successfully cured, you will feel a bit of “give” between the shell and the kernel. You don’t need every single nut to “give”, just a decent percentage of them. That “give” tells you they are good to cook — trust that feeling over any rule of thumb about how long should be the right amount of time.

Scoring

Before cooking chestnuts, you need to “score” the shells or they will explode during cooking. There are a few ways to score chestnuts:

You can use a knife or a pair of scissors to cut halfway around each chestnut’s belly, “pac-man” style.
You can use a chestnut press, which works like a garlic press and makes an x-shaped incision.
You can use a hammer to lightly crack each shell. We find the hammer is the safest and fastest method, once you get the hang of it.

Have an Open Mind!

The world is home to many different kinds of chestnuts. If you’ve cooked with chestnuts before, please don’t assume that the same approaches will work in the same way with all chestnuts! The chestnut trees that grow here in the Northeast are diverse hybrids, but the nuts they produce are predominantly “Chinese-type”. Compared to chestnuts (including ‘marroni’) that grow in Europe, the nuts we grow have a sweeter flavor and a yellower color, peel more easily, and are more dense (which benefits from some slightly different approaches to cooking them).

Cooking

Chestnuts are a delicious carbohydrate that you can think about like big corn kernels or little sweet potatoes. There are so many great ways to cook with chestnuts! Remember to always cure and score chestnuts before preparing them.

Roast

Roasted chestnuts are great to eat on their own (try not to!), and can be added into dishes like stir fry, stew, salad, or pasta, or blitzed to make chestnut cream or soup.

Pre-heat an oven to 425-450° F.
Score or crack your cured chestnuts by method of your choice.
On a baking tray or pan, roast the chestnuts for 10-20 minutes, to your taste. Larger chestnuts will take longer to cook.
Let the chestnuts cool to the point you can comfortably handle them, and then shell them immediately.

Par-boil & Roast (or Broil)

This approach takes a little longer but produces a softer texture and a deeply caramelized flavor. We like this method in general, and also find it’s a great option if your nuts have gotten a bit dry.

Pre-heat an oven to 425-450° F.
Bring a pot of water to boil.
Score or crack your cured chestnuts by method of your choice.
Par-boil the nuts for 10-15 minutes.
Remove nuts from water and transfer to a baking tray or pan. Roast (or broil) the chestnuts for 10-20 minutes, to your taste. Larger chestnuts will take longer to cook.
Let the chestnuts cool to the point you can comfortably handle them, and then shell them immediately.

Boil

Boiled chestnuts have a milder flavor than roasted, but their creamy texture can be well suited to soups, creams, or spreads.

Bring a pot of water to boil.
Score or crack your cured chestnuts by method of your choice.
Add the chestnuts to the boiling water and reduce to a simmer.
Simmer un-covered for 10-30 minutes, to taste. Larger chestnuts will take longer to cook.
Let the chestnuts cool to the point you can comfortably handle them, and then shell them immediately.

Blanch

If you want to easily remove shells from uncooked chestnuts: score, blanch in boiling water for 1 minute, and transfer to cold water. Once blanched, shell and pellicle can be easily removed from nut kernels, which will be golden and still raw. You can then incorporate these kernels in sautés, stir-fries, stews etc.