This morning my wife and I were researching recipes that use chestnuts and we stumbled across a great one in Marcella Hazen’s The Classic Italian Cookbook. Going to the internet to dig deeper we sadly discovered that this great Italian cook and author passed away just yesterday. I am ever amazed at the convergence of events. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Hazen family.
On pages 440-442 of The Classic Italian Cookbook Marcella Hazen lists a most interesting desert recipe using chestnuts, titled Monte Bianco, which includes instructions on how to prepare raw, unpeeled chestnuts for inclusion in the recipe. The dessert looks delicious but we’re not sure yet if we will make it–we are still working on perfecting cooking the raw chestnuts for uses in recipes.
Here’s the process we are currently experimenting with:
- Take about a pound of fresh chestnuts. You can find a number of sources on the internet, or you can come out for the next couple of weeks and get some fresh from our farm.
- Wash the nuts in cold water. It is best to place them in standing water with a teaspoon of household bleach added for each gallon of water for sanitation purposes. Any nuts that float to the top are duds and need to be discarded.
- Pull the nuts out of the water and set out on cloth or paper towels to drain.
- Place each nut on a chopping board and score the nut with a large x across the rounded side of the nut with a knife. Make sure you make it through the shell, but try not to score too deeply into the meat. This is a dangerous job and great care should be taken not to cut a finger off. This is definitely not a child-friendly activity. Special chestnut knives with a hooked blade are available that make the job much easier.
- Place the scored nuts into a covered pot of boiling water for 10 minutes.
- Remove the nuts from the boiling water with a slotted spoon–a few at a time–and peel the shell and skin from the creamy-white nut. This is a hot job but the shells and skins peel much more easily while they are still quite warm.
- Place the peeled nuts back int0 the boiling water for an additional 15 minutes to finish cooking.
- At this stage the nuts can be incorporated into many recipes such as Monte Bianco right away. If you don’t intend to cook with them right away they need to be stored sealed in the refrigerator for up to a week or so. They can be kept for months sealed in a container in the freezer.