21 Chestnut Recipes That Demand a Spot on Your Holiday Table (2024)

FAQs

What are chestnuts used for in cooking? ›

Chestnuts are also eaten as a stuffing or cooked with pheasant, duck, goose, and chicken. Chestnut-fed pork and beef are considered a delicacy because the chestnuts impart a sweet flavor to the meat. Pigs are fed on chestnuts to produce such specialties as the Serrano hams in Italy and 'jamón ibérico' in Spain.

Chestnuts are rarely on their own in cakes and desserts. Other fruit, especially pear, also go well, and ingredients such as chocolate and different types of whipped cream also contribute to exalting the nuances and flavours of chestnuts.

Oven-roasting chestnuts is the best way to bring out the fullest flavour (if you want to eat them straight away or chop them into your stuffing mix). Boiling them will give a smooth texture for cooking in soups or purées.

How to cook chestnuts. Fresh chestnuts must always be cooked before use and are never eaten raw, owing to their tannic acid content. You need to remove the chestnuts from their skins by either boiling or roasting them.

With their sweet, earthy flavour, chestnuts are a perfect complement to a wide variety of ingredients, including everything from fruit and vegetables, to chocolate and meat. For instance, a chocolate and chestnut cake is heavenly, while no one can resist a creamy risotto sprinkled with smoked chestnut flour.

They can be candied or puréed and sweetened for desserts. They are used to make fritelli (fritters), and they are also used as a substitute for potatoes in stews. Many Italian-Americans incorporate chestnuts into their Thanksgiving stuffing.

In the past, it was new wine that accompanied roasted chestnuts, or even better, a slightly sparkling wine, which cleanses the mouth of the chestnuts' mellow flavor. This is still a valid choice, but in almost all Italian regions there are other young, light red wines that pair wonderfully as well.

Chestnuts lose some of their vitamin C if you boil or roast them, but still have anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of your daily intake for this healthy vitamin. To retain more vitamin C in chestnuts when cooking, you can roast them at lower temperatures or use a food dehydrator to dry them.

The soaking period allows the shells to fill up with water. The water in turn produces a steaming effect when the chestnuts roast, forcing the shells to burst away from the nut. Many recipes and tips I've encountered throughout my cooking life call for a brief soak, 30 minutes or so.

I score the chestnut peels first and soak the chestnuts in water before roasting. The residual water left in the drained chestnuts creates steam in the hot pan, keeping the chestnuts from drying out and making them easier to peel.

How many chestnuts should I eat a day? ›

Just 10 roasted chestnuts include 17% of what you need for the day — a major plus considering most of us don't get nearly enough. Americans eat on average about 16 grams of fiber per day, half of the recommended amount of 25 to 30 grams.

Raw: Water chestnuts can be eaten raw as a snack or sliced up and added to salads to make them crunchy. Cooked: There are many ways to cook water chestnuts, including stir-frying, boiling, and baking.

What Do Roasted Chestnuts Taste Like? Chestnuts are crunchy and bitter when raw, but become sweet, buttery, and soft when roasted. Some people find the flavor reminiscent of a cooked sweet potato.

“Any way you would use nuts, you could use chestnuts,” Applegate says. They have a nutty, sweet flavor, and a slightly mealy, crumbly texture. For hearty meals, chestnuts work well as an addition to bread-based stuffing because their richness makes a good complement to the savory herbal notes typically used, Kamp says.

Though the American Chestnut tree technically still grows in the U.S., it's highly endangered because of the blight fungus which remains rampant along the eastern region of the United States. Once planted, the tree is guaranteed to die from the fungus.