Chestnut Flour Project
Thank you for taking part in Breadtree’s Flour Project.
We’ve put together some information and resources as a guide:
Grains Grow On Trees?
For millennia, tree crops like acorn, hickory, and chestnut were keystone foods for native peoples of North America, and many other cultures around the world. Today, people in the U.S. primarily eat annual grains like wheat and corn, which are generally grown in monocultures — fields with a single crop species that needs to be replanted every year, and are either tilled (causing topsoil loss and greenhouse gas emissions) or sprayed with pesticides (which accumulate in soil, rivers and oceans, food, and our bodies).
Modern climate science continues to show that shifting farming from “conventional” annual crops to perennial tree crops is one of the most effective strategies in the world to mitigate climate change. It is also an important strategy for creating a more resilient and sustainable bioregional food system here in the Northeast U.S. This is why Breadtree Farms is working to build new farming and food systems that make staple tree crops an important part of food culture in the Eastern U.S. again.
We transition degraded, conventional cropland into diverse, organic farms that bring together forest, pasture, livestock, and food-producing trees. Today, our farms produce organic chestnuts, lamb and beef raised on pasture, honey, and maple syrup. In coming years, our farms will produce other “new” perennial staples like hickory oil, acorn flour, and seaberry juice (a “Northern citrus alternative”). We are seeking partnership from bakers and chefs like you to help build food culture around these perennial crops, and we look forward to learning from your experience.
How it started (2019): bare earth, herbicide residue, and corn stubble
How it’s going (2025): beef cattle grazing on pasture between organic chestnut trees
Why Chestnuts?
Chestnuts are grains that grow on trees. Nutritionally similar to potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, wheat, and corn, you can roast or boil chestnuts, or make them into soups or stews or stir-fries. You can also dry and mill them to make gluten-free flour, and foods like polenta, pasta, pancakes, tortillas, and bread.
Because chestnuts grow on trees, they get planted once, and they live for centuries — while producing staple calories, building soil, improving air and water quality, creating wildlife habitat, and sequestering carbon.
Shifting more of our grain consumption from annual grains to perennial grains like chestnuts can contribute to healthier landscapes, healthier food, healthier human communities, and a healthier climate. We see chestnuts as a keystone crop that can support the growth of resilient and truly sustainable food systems at a watershed scale in the Northeast. You can learn more here about the benefits of chestnuts and our approach to farming.
For millennia, chestnuts have been a keystone food in wise human cultures all over the world, from North America to the Mediterranean to East Asia. Many of these cultures have called chestnuts the “bread tree”.
About the Chestnut Flour Project
Our intention is to put chestnut flour in the hands of talented chefs and bakers like you, so that you can get familiar with this ingredient, develop new ways of cooking with it, and create opportunities for more people to become aware and excited about using it. We are very interested to hear about your experience working with chestnut flour, and any and all feedback you might like to share with us. Thank you for bringing to this project your willingness to experiment and your passion for bioregional food systems. We are working to secure grant funding to expand the paid opportunities for partners like you in the future, so please let us know if that would be of interest in the months and years to come.
If you are new to working with chestnut flour, we invite you to check out some of the recipes on our website, which we hope will give you some ideas and a starting point for exploration. We ask that you share your feedback and experience with us and consider any of the following:
Post to social media about your experiments and tag our farm (@breadtreefarms)
Include a mention about your experiments in email / substack / or whatever form your communications take with your audience and link to our website
Share a recipe you tried for us to include on our website (which will link to your website or social media)
Take high quality photo or video of your experimenting / resulting experiments and share with us
Connect us with other interested bakers / chefs / food bloggers / food writers / etc who might be interested to participate in this work
Fresh chestnuts, dried whole chestnut kernels, milled chestnut flour
Feedback questions we are specifically interested in:
What do you find are your favorite ways to work with this flour? We welcome any thoughts you have on recipe directions you’re interested in exploring, or recipes you've tried and liked, etc. If you come up with any recipes and are interested in featuring them on our site or newsletter, or would like to propose some agreement for sharing them, please let us know.
Your thoughts on difference in use between coarse and fine flours? Do you have a preference? Do you have any desires for other options for grind size (e.g. a 00 ultra fine grind, or something more coarse)? The coarse flour is unsifted — do you like working with it this way, or would you prefer to work with a sifted flour that had uniform grind?
Working with chestnut flour is a bit different than working with other types of gluten free flours. We would love to hear some of your general guidelines on working with the flour that might support home bakers, including best practices for substituting chestnut flour in other recipe. For example, we’ve found that one of the biggest challenges with chestnut flour so far has been a tendency toward dryness. Our experience has been that it helps to add more egg and/or more fat to any given recipe than you might guess, to counteract that dryness.
Your general feedback on whether you would work with this flour in your bakeries / restaurants / etc. We know the price point of our flour is far from being viable for most commercial bakery operations, but we’d love to hear some feedback about what price point would make it more more accessible, and if/how you would consider working with it in a smaller scale way.
Tradition: smoke drying chestnuts for 40 days in the Pistoia Mountains (Photo Credit: Tad Cooke)
Chestnuts have sustained the mountain peoples of Southern Europe for centuries. (Photo Credit: Gianfranco Bini)
Tuscan flatbreads (castagnaccio) and crepe / wraps (necci) from 100% chestnut flour. (Photo Credit: Tad Cooke)
Chestnut trees can continuously produce for 500+ years. (Photo Credit: Costa Boutsikaris)
Breadtree & friends with a chestnut tree planted before the birth of Christopher Colombus (November 2024)
Chestnut Learning Resources
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Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J Russell Smith — affectionately known as the tree crops bible, this book was first published in 1929 and is one of the best intros to the world of tree crops in the US. The first section is a really helpful big picture argument / vision, and then the rest of the book goes into a lot of very specific agronomic detail tree by tree. I’ve split out pdfs of the first section and the chestnut section:
First section (pp. 2-29)
Chestnut chapter in Tree Crops
Max Jones / Up There The Last — “real-time traditional food conservation project for the active remembering, revival and perpetuation of our disappearing food heritage.” He has some good writing on chestnut culture / traditions from Italy.
Agrarian Futures Podcast — Interview w/ Russell Wallack (Breadtree Farms)
'Chestnuts For Resistance' Zine by Libby Green — thesis project pamphlet with a sweet overview of chestnuts
Revisiting the Resilience of Chestnut Forests in Corsica – this is a paper documenting the ‘castagnetu’ (traditional chestnut culture) in Corsica, and gives a beautiful sense of what could be possible.
Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson — an awe-inspiring ethnography of the foodways and lifeways of precolonial Native Peoples of California. Context for everything we take for granted about where food comes from.
CAES Nutritional Analysis — CT Agricultural Experiment Station’s nutritional analysis of different chestnut species
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This is a series made by our friend Costa documenting forest cultures around the world. This link features the 3 short episodes focused on chestnuts, including an episode featuring Rt 9 Cooperative who grew the chestnuts that became the flour you are using!
Silvopasture Introduction — Farming With Trees
Traditional Azerbaijani chestnut chicken pilaf in the mountains
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Trees of Power by Akiva Silver – See “Fountains of Life” section
Landscape and Change in Medieval Italy: Chestnuts, Economy, & Culture
Libby Green’s 2021 Thesis: “Nuts of Resistance”
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More About Breadtree
Breadtree is working to reintroduce chestnuts (and other tree crops) as important food sources in the Northeast. Over the last 6 years, we have transitioned ~250 acres of conventional corn, soy, & hay fields (in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley and Southwest Vermont) into organic nut and fruit orchards designed to be grazed by sheep and cattle. We farm using certified-organic practices that reduce erosion, enhance water quality, improve wildlife habitat, and support a healthy climate. Today, our 800+ acre operation is the largest agroforestry operation in the Northeast U.S., and (with USDA support) we are developing barns at our home farm into the largest chestnut processing facility in the U.S. To learn more about our work, see here.