Oven Roasted Chestnuts

Printed from: www.grandmotherskitchen.net

Ingredients

Makes: Amount as per the amount of chestnuts you are roasting

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

2. If you have picked your own chestnuts off the ground They will likely have the very spiky outer casing on them. Using thick gardening or work gloves, remove the prickly shell.

3. Fresh chestnuts must always be cooked before eating to removing their tannic acid content.

4. Wash the chestnuts before cutting if you have picked them off the ground as they are on the dirty side.

5. If you are buying pre-shelled chestnuts you can just go straight ahead and put the cut on each on.

6. Using a sharp knife, make an X on each chestnut. In looking at other methods it would be easier to later peel them if there was one big long score across half the chestnut instead of the X. It is difficult to cut into the nut to make the X and that made it hard to make an X long enough that it would make peeling easier after roasting. Next time we would just put one long cut across the center of each chestnut.

7. Place the chestnuts onto a roasting sheet, like a cookie pan and cook in preheated oven for 18 minutes.

8. Remove from the oven.

9. Let cool just enough to handle then peel the chestnut from where you make the X.

10. Peel the chestnut with your fingers. We found that most of the shells would not come off easily so we reheated the chestnuts in the oven for 5 minutes, put into a bowl and covered it with a wet tea towel so the chestnuts would 'steam' and get softer. We then peeled more of the chestnuts and again found it pretty difficult although it was easier than just baking.

11. The third thing we did was to boil the roasted chestnuts in water for a few minutes to soften more. After straining, we peeled and yes there were softer and the flavor remained close to the same as being just roasted. Overall we found we just did too many chestnuts all at once.

12. The nuts were delicious roasted and will be nice used in recipes.

13. You can freeze the nuts in ziploc bags and when needed.

14. We used a few of these roasted chestnuts in our Baked Spinach Dip Recipe instead of canned ones and it added a bit of a nutty flavor to the dip.

Enjoy!

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