Flour Project

Thank you for taking part in this project.

For millennia, food like acorn, hickory, and chestnut were keystone foods for many native peoples of North America, as well as many other cultures around the world. Breadtree Farms is working to build sustainable, bioregional farm and food systems that make staple tree crops an important part of food culture in the Eastern U.S. again. 

Climate science continues to show that shifting staple food production from annual to perennial agricultures is one of the most effective strategies in the world to mitigate climate change. Foods like chestnuts, acorns, and hickories grow on keystone trees that live for centuries while providing habitat to hundreds of species, building soil, enhancing water quality, and anchoring whole ecosystems. 

We see these tree crops as essential to creating sustainable, resilient agriculture and food systems in our region. Helping to (re)build new food culture around perennial staples like chestnuts is a powerful way that you can support this important transition. We deeply appreciate your help in this effort, and we look forward to learning from you about your experience.

How it started: bare earth, herbicide residue, and corn stubble in 2019

How it’s going: beef cattle grazing on pasture between organic chestnut trees in 2024

Why Chestnuts?

Most grains in the U.S. are grown in “conventional”, annual monocultures — fields with a single crop species that needs to be replanted every year, and are either tilled or sprayed with pesticides. We transition degraded, conventional cropland like this into diverse, organic farms that grow more than one kind of food, by bringing together forest, pasture, livestock, and food-producing trees.

Chestnuts are a staple carbohydrate, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, wheat, and corn. You can roast or boil chestnuts, and 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.

But unlike annual starches like wheat and corn, chestnuts grow on trees. They get planted once, and they live for centuries — while producing staple calories, building soil, cleaning rivers and oceans, and sequestering carbon. For this reason, cultures around the world have called chestnuts the “bread tree”. 

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.

About the Flour Project

We sent you between 5-10 lbs of coarse and fine chestnut flour. Our goal is to help develop new ways of cooking with these ingredients, and create opportunities for more people to become aware and excited about using them. We really appreciate people (like you) who are passionate about bioregional food systems being willing to do and share these experiments without compensation for your time. We’re here in the early days of building a farm and food company that we hope will last for decades or centuries — we value your time and perspective, and we look forward to a future where we can pay for more formal partnerships around recipe development, collaborate to publish cookbooks, etc.

We invite you to experiment with developing new recipes with this flour, and share your experience and results. We encourage 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 either:

  1. Post to social media about your experiments and tag our farm (@breadtreefarms)

  2. Include a mention about your experiments in email / substack / or whatever form your communications take with your audience and link to our website

  3. Share a recipe you tried for us to include on our website (which will link to your website or social media)

  4. Take high quality photo or video of your experimenting / resulting experiments and share with us

  5. Connect us with other interested bakers / chefs / food bloggers / food writers / etc that might be interested to participate in this work

Fresh chestnuts, dried whole chestnut kernels, milled chestnut flour

Feedback questions we are specifically interested in: 

  1. Thoughts on difference between coarse and fine flours? Do you have a preference? Do you have any desires for slight shifts in grit size? The coarse flour is unsifted — do you like working with it this way?

  2. 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. For example, we’ve found that one of the biggest challenges with chestnut flour so far has been a tendency toward dryness. Our non professional take is that one needs to add more egg and/or more fat (than you might guess) to any given recipe you might be playing with to counteract that dryness.

  3. 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 / whether you would consider working with it in a smaller scale way.

Resources for Deeper Learning

Start Here:

  • 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:

  • 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.

  • CAES Nutritional Analysis — CT Agricultural Experiment Station’s nutritional analysis of different chestnut species

Videos:

Deeper dive:

Recipe Ideas:

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 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 we are the largest agroforestry operation in the Northeast U.S.