Cooking chestnuts on a blower stove

Cooking chestnuts on a blower stove after microwave cooking makes for chestnut cooking perfection.

Background to cooking chestnuts recipe

There are just so many ways of cooking chestnuts, probably as many as the number of generations that have been born since edible chestnuts were cultivated.

Boiling cooking of chestnuts. The raw chestnuts start off with flesh that is indigestibly crunchy, unappetising, and slightly bitter. Simple boiling will make them at least edible, sweet tasting and digestible and less likely to give you a fart attack. However, this low-temperature cooking still leaves a bitter-tasting membrane (pellicle) attached stubbornly to the flesh that becomes quite crumbly. “Maybe the crumbs would be good to scoop out for further use in cooking, but it is not a good way to enjoy freshly cooked chestnuts.”

Note: After boiling some chestnuts, out of curiosity, I roasted them over a blower stove flame. The flavour was better, but the crumbly flesh texture was unchanged and was best scooped out from the adhering membrane with a teaspoon to eat it.

Cooking chestnuts by oven baking. Oven baking improves the flavour and helps the bitter membrane to release more easily. Even so, this cooking method falls short of creating the premium caramelised or coffee flavour that makes them such a delightful autumn treat to complement a hot cup of tea or coffee. There also is a tendency to dry the flesh out too much in smaller nuts and make them hard. On the other hand, the larger nuts may be undercooked and partly raw.

High-temperature roasting cooking of chestnuts. In my experience, the high temperature of glowing charcoal or a hot flame that starts to burn the outer skin of the chestnut is the best way of cooking chestnuts. It is the only way of cooking chestnuts that can impart the desired caramelised premium flavour to the flesh. “A propane torch flame will also suffice as in my secret Abalone beach cooking recipe“.

The intense heat makes the outer skin and the now crisp membrane easily release with just that wonderful, slightly messy, rolling action between the thumb and forefinger. “Avoiding smouldering hot spots on parts of the chestnut’s shiny skin (husk) is an acquired skill for this rolling process, and is part of the fun. Campfire cooking this way is great fun. “However, at home, the smoke that accompanies such roasting will unfortunately not be welcome in many kitchens.”

Blower stove chestnut cooking. Modernity has disconnected many of us from high-temperature cooking fires at home. Backyard bonfires, open wood-burning fires, from my childhood, are almost a thing of the past and even wood-burning stoves are illegal in many built-up areas. Consequently, my little mobile stick-fired blower stove can be used to bring back that primitive finishing touch to cooking chestnuts.

I started by cooking chestnuts entirely on the blower stove and this worked well enough. However, it was difficult to get the flesh cooked evenly (as for the oven method) when cooking nuts with a wide range of sizes. “The smaller nuts would be overcooked and the large ones would be undercooked.”

Microwave cooking. Microwave ovens cook by irradiating the food with microwave radiation. For chestnuts, the microwaves vibrate the molecules of water and oils inside the nut to provide the cooking heat from within each nut. Consequently, microwave cooking is ideally uniform, regardless of the range of nut sizes. It also makes the cooking time very short, avoids the excessive dryness of the oven method and also avoids the crumbling involved with the boiling method. With some precautions to prevent explosions, this chestnut cooking method is just about perfect if it is followed up with a quick high-temperature caramelization roasting in a device such as a blower stove.

So all this leads to my perfect way of cooking chestnuts that is compatible with modernity. “Yes, it involves a brief high-tech quick zap in a microwave oven followed by a quick low-tech roast on a tiny blower stove. The stove is so small and portable that it is suitable for use outside a modern house with a microwave oven inside. It can be operated in a ‘pocket handkerchief’ sized garden. The fuel required is just a handful of little sticks from the garden or a park. The sticks shown in the above photo have roasted 4 batches of nuts and will probably roast another three batches of chestnuts. After that, it will be another walk to the park to pick up another bundle of sticks.

The recipe for microwave-cooked and blower stove-finished chestnuts

Preparation. For two handfuls of chestnuts (~150g) put deep cuts into them (through the membrane) so that they do not make a steam explosion when microwaving them for ~3 minutes. This time will vary according to the microwave oven’s basic cooking power.

Note: If not properly cut, the nuts WILL explode in the microwave oven and splatter chestnut butter throughout the oven. “At least you will know that they were cooked!” I also found that confining the nuts in a casserole bowl with a lid was ineffective. The force of the explosion blew the lid off and broke it and I still had a mess to clean up!

I have seen that some people recommend pricking the chestnuts with a pin or cutting a cross on the widest side of the chestnut. However, I find that a deep cut from the rounded end of the chestnut where the skin surface is dull (hilum) is best. This should cut into both membranes if there are two separate membranes inside one nut. This twinning happens quite often in the nuts that I grow. “Even a very small hidden twin can make an excitingly big and messy explosion.”

Blower stove roasting after thorough microwave chestnut cooking. This process is not quite as quick as microwave cooking, but it is still delightfully brief and provides frequent excuses to play with fire. Having started the blower stove I put a mesh screen over the stove and place the microwaved nuts on top. I shuffle the larger ones into the hottest middle of the burner and the smaller ones around them.

After the outer skin on the smaller nuts has become scorched, they should be removed from the heat and then the larger ones can be removed after a little more roasting. When adequately roasted, the skin and membrane will be crisp and easy to remove by rolling the nut between the thumb and forefinger.

Perfection in chestnut cooking by roasting is reached when there are black toasted patches on the surface of the edible part of the nut. This browning is probably caused by the Maillard reaction which occurs when amino acids and sugars, in the chestnut flesh, react at elevated temperatures. “This reaction is at the heart of our most flavoursome cooking.” Even though the blackness will be limited to just part of the surface, the flavour enhancement is imparted to the whole nut (just as with fish smoking).

Portable chestnut field roasting.

The above recipe involves microwaving followed immediately by blower stove roasting. However, portable field chestnut cooking can be good fun and may be required. In this case, the microwave cooking can be done at home and the roasting finish can be done anywhere in the field with the blower stove at the cookout site.

Cooking preservation of chestnuts?

Each year I usually have an excess of chestnuts. They often start to spout or go mouldy even when stored in airtight bags under refrigeration. I have tried the traditional Italian preservation method of baking the cut nuts in an oven (suggested by friends). While the preservation worked well, the end product was rather hard and unappetising.

As an alternative, this season I will try microwave cooking as above and then storing the nuts in the freezer in sealed bags until it is time to roast and eat them.

I am also trying frozen storage of fresh chestnuts as another alternative preservation method. With some luck, these storage methods may extend the ‘chestnut-eating-season’ well into winter and I will report my findings in another post, probably after the ski season.

In the meantime, keep those membrane cuts deep so you don’t have any microwave explosions from hidden twin nuts and have happy chestnut roasting!

Tim

Addendum 1- Roasting in a biscuit tin lid.

High-temperature pan roasting is an alternative to final roasting over the metal mesh as described above. Because there is minimal heat sinking from the pan it will not be good for kitchen or camping cookware, so a biscuit tin lid can suffice as the pan and can be used over the blower stove.

I made a little wooden handle for the pan so that it could be used easily without tongs and the handle could be rotated over the pan for compact storage or carrying and always ready for use.

The pan roasting is still quick, but a tiny bit slower than the direct method. However, when compared to the metal mesh alternative, it has some advantages such as:

1. Tidier and nicer to store and carry and can be used for cooking other things, such as the above-mentioned Abalone beach cooking recipe.
2. It holds the chestnuts on the cooking surface and they can’t roll off or fall through,
3. Easier to prevent over-roasting and
4. Lastly, the pan, unlike the mesh, closes the top of the blower stove fire bowl. This action makes the stove much easier to start and then makes fuel sticks burn hotter, even when they are damp or wet.

This pan method (still following microwaving) is so good that it has become my favourite cooking method. Also, as for my other backpacking cookware made from biscuit tins, an after-use wipe-down with a trace of olive oil on a tissue will give the mild steel a long service life. Tinpot tinkerers must be blessed by the gods, as even the oily wipe-down tissues can be used as fire starters for the next chestnut roasting.

Addendum 2- A weather cover for the chestnut roaster

My chestnut roaster is used for cooking small batches quite often so it is convenient to leave it in place with a bed of charcoal and residual fuel sticks in place. However, my extended ‘chestnut-cooking-season’ invariably coincides with inclement weather with frequent showers of rain between each cooking session. These can leave the charcoal and fuel very wet. Consequently, this roasting stove and the residual fuels will be more convenient if they can be covered by a metal weather shield between uses.

Additionally, if this weather shield can exclude air entry it will snuff the combustion, preserve the fuel, make the fire safe and gently roast the residual fuel sticks to make a quick start for the next batch. Importantly, it removes the temptation to shift the sticks with smouldering ends to a dry place where they may accidentally set fire to something else.

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