Feature

All thoughts turn to Christmas as soon as bags of chestnuts hit the shelves or the smell of roasted chestnuts hits you in the street. Chestnuts roasted on the open fire, or in the oven, are one of the memorable aromas of the winter festivities. Delicious eaten alone, they can also be used in many seasonal winter dishes and desserts.

Chestnuts look like your everyday nut, but are entirely different. Compared with other trees’ nuts, they contain a much lower fat content, which makes them healthy and suitable for calorie-controlled diets. And unlike many other nuts, they can be used in lots of culinary ways.
Chestnuts are important as a baking ingredient. They can be dried and ground into flour for making cakes, soaked in syrup and used as decoration for cakes and puddings or simply chopped into stuffing for poultry roasts. It can also be made into a purée and served as a traditional accompaniment to game.

When buying fresh chestnuts, choose heavy nuts with skins that are shiny and smooth, not puckered. They should be used quickly, as they become tough and lose flavour when they start to dry out. Boiling or roasting makes their skins easier to remove.
Here are two chestnut-based dishes to enjoy on a cold winter’s day.

Chestnut, apple and pine kernel stuffing

Perfect for a roast dinner of turkey, Christmas or otherwise, this stuffing is nutty, fruit and delicious. It also suits other poultry dishes and makes a tasty and nutritious vegetarian dish to accompany all the roast dinner trimmings.

Ingredients:
1 small onion, chopped;
grated zest of 1 lemon;
25g butter;
110g white breadcrumbs;
1 tbsp (15g) chopped parsley;
2 English dessert apples, peeled, cored and chopped;
50g pine nuts;
100g chopped cooked chestnuts (fresh or from frozen);
2 medium eggs, beaten;
salt and freshly ground pepper.

Method:
Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C for fan-assisted ovens). Gently sweat the onion and lemon zest in the butter for 10 minutes. Add the onion mixture to the other ingredients, binding with the eggs. Roll into balls and place on a greased baking sheet. Cook for 20 minutes or until brown. Serve around the roasted meat.

Chocolate chestnut pudding with caramelised chestnuts

This wintery pudding from This Morning and Ready Steady Cook’s Leslie Waters is hardly healthy, but it’s a rich pudding with a seasonal taste of oranges and chestnuts.

For the chocolate sauce:
50ml double cream;
1 tbsp cocoa powder;
2 tbsp honey;
2 tbsp butter;
2 tbsp milk

For the chestnut filling:
150g cooked chestnuts (fresh or from frozen), peeled;
2 tbsp icing sugar;
4 tbsp double cream;
150ml double cream, whipped;
2 oranges, peeled and segmented
For the caramelised chestnuts:
2 tbsp of caster sugar;
25g cooked whole chestnuts (fresh or from frozen);
juice of half an orange

Method:
To make the chocolate sauce, in a saucepan warm the double cream for two minutes. Add the cocoa, honey, butter and milk. Mix to form a smooth sauce and remove from the heat.
To make the chestnut filling, blend the chestnut mixture with the icing sugar and four tablespoons of double cream. Fold the whipped cream into this mixture.
In two large glasses, place the orange segments, chestnut mixture and chocolate sauce in layers. Repeat this process.

For the caramelised chestnuts, place the sugar into a hot frying pan and let it melt. Add the chestnuts and coat. Add orange juice and mix. Serve on top of the chestnut puddings.

Picture caption: Nuts to cold weather – roasting chestnuts are synonymous with the Christmas season.